Part 9

Since then Professor George McLean Harper has completed and published, (1916,) his classic book on _William Wordsworth, His Life, Works, and Influence_. This is undoubtedly the very best biography of the poet, and it contains much new material, particularly with reference to his life and connections in France. But there is nothing in it to shake, and on the contrary there is much to confirm, the opinion which was first put forth in this essay: namely, that the central theme, the great significance, of Wordsworth’s poetry is _the recovery of joy_.

I

William Wordsworth was born in 1770 in the town of Cockermouth in Cumberland; educated in the village school of Hawkshead among the mountains, and at St. John’s College, Cambridge. A dreamy, moody youth; always ambitious, but not always industrious; passionate in disposition, with high spirits, simple tastes, and independent virtues; he did not win, and seems not to have desired, university honours. His principal property when he came of age consisted of two manuscript poems,—_An Evening Walk_ and _Descriptive Sketches_,—composed in the manner of Cowper’s _Task_. With these in his pocket he wandered over to France; partly to study the language; partly to indulge his inborn love of travel by a second journey on the Continent; and partly to look on at the vivid scenes of the French Revolution. But the vast dæmonic movement of which he proposed to be a spectator caught his mind in its current and swept him out of his former self.

Wordsworth was not originally a revolutionist, like Coleridge and Southey. He was not even a native radical, except as all simplicity and austerity of character tend towards radicalism. When he passed through Paris, in November of 1791, and picked up a bit of stone from the ruins of the Bastile as a souvenir, it was only a sign of youthful sentimentality. But when he came back to Paris in October of 1792, after a winter at Orleans and a summer at Blois, in close intercourse with that ardent and noble republican, Michael Beaupuy, he had been converted into an eager partisan of the Republic. He even dreamed of throwing himself into the conflict, reflecting on “the power of one pure and energetic will to accomplish great things.”

His conversion was not, it seems to me, primarily a matter of intellectual conviction. It was an affair of emotional sympathy. His knowledge of the political and social theories of the Revolution was but superficial. He was never a doctrinaire. The influence of Rousseau and Condorcet did not penetrate far beneath the skin of his mind. It was the primal joy of the Revolutionary movement that fascinated him,—the confused glimmering of new hopes and aspirations for mankind. He was like a man who has journeyed, half asleep, from the frost-bound dulness of a wintry clime, and finds himself, fully awake, in a new country, where the time for the singing of birds has come, and the multitudinous blossoming of spring bursts forth. He is possessed by the spirit of joy, and reason follows where feeling leads the way. Wordsworth himself has confessed, half unconsciously, the secret of his conversion in his lines on _The French Revolution as it appeared to Enthusiasts at its Commencement_.

“Oh! pleasant exercise of hope and joy! For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood Upon our side, we who were strong in love! Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!”

There was another “bliss,” keener even than the dreams of political enthusiasm, that thrilled him in this momentous year,—the rapture of romantic love. Into this he threw himself with ardour and tasted all its joy. We do not know exactly what it was that broke the vision and dashed the cup of gladness from his lips. Perhaps it was some difficulty with the girl’s family, who were royalists. Perhaps it was simply the poet’s poverty. Whatever the cause was, love’s young dream was shattered, and there was nothing left but the painful memory of an error, to be atoned for in later years as best he could.

His political hopes and ideals were darkened by the actual horrors which filled Paris during the fall of 1792. His impulse to become a revolutionist was shaken, if not altogether broken. Returning to England at the end of the same year, he tried to sustain his sinking spirits by setting in order the reasons and grounds of his new-born enthusiasm, already waning. His letter to Bishop Watson, written in 1793, is the fullest statement of republican sympathies that he ever made. In it he even seems to justify the execution of Louis XVI, and makes light of “the idle cry of modish lamentation which has resounded from the court to the cottage” over the royal martyr’s fate. He defends the right of the people to overthrow all who oppress them, to choose their own rulers, to direct their own destiny by universal suffrage, and to sweep all obstacles out of their way. The reasoning is so absolute, so relentless, the scorn for all who oppose it is so lofty, that already we begin to suspect a wavering conviction intrenching itself for safety.

The course of events in France was ill fitted to nourish the joy of a pure-minded enthusiast. The tumultuous terrors of the Revolution trod its ideals in the dust. Its light was obscured in its own sulphurous smoke. Robespierre ran his bloody course to the end; and when his head fell under the guillotine, Wordsworth could not but exult. War was declared between France and England, and his heart was divided; but the deeper and stronger ties were those that bound him to his own country. He was English in his very flesh and bones. The framework of his mind was of Cumberland. So he stood rooted in his native allegiance, while the leaves and blossoms of joy fell from him, like a tree stripped bare by the first great gale of autumn.

The years from 1793 to 1795 were the period of his deepest poverty, spiritual and material. His youthful poems, published in 1793, met with no more success than they deserved. His plans for entering into active life were feeble and futile. His mind was darkened and confused, his faith shaken to the foundation, and his feelings clouded with despair. In this crisis of disaster two gifts of fortune came to him. His sister Dorothy took her place at his side, to lead him back by her wise, tender, cheerful love from the far country of despair. His friend Raisley Calvert bequeathed to him a legacy of nine hundred pounds; a small inheritance, but enough to protect him from the wolf of poverty, while he devoted his life to the muse. From the autumn of 1795, when he and his sister set up housekeeping together in a farmhouse at Racedown, until his death in 1850 in the cottage at Rydal Mount, where he had lived for thirty-seven years with his wife and children, there was never any doubt about the disposition of his life. It was wholly dedicated to poetry.

II

But what kind of poetry? What was to be its motive power? What its animating spirit? Here the experience of life acting upon his natural character became the deciding factor.

Wordsworth was born a lover of joy, not sensual, but spiritual. The first thing that happened to him, when he went out into the world, was that he went bankrupt of joy. The enthusiasm of his youth was dashed, the high hope of his spirit was quenched. At the touch of reality his dreams dissolved. It seemed as though he were altogether beaten, a broken man. But with the gentle courage of his sister to sustain him, his indomitable spirit rose again, to renew the adventure of life. He did not evade the issue, by turning aside to seek for fame or wealth. His problem from first to last was the problem of joy,—inward, sincere, imperishable joy. How to recover it after life’s disappointments, how to deepen it amid life’s illusions, how to secure it through life’s trials, how to spread it among life’s confusions,—this was the problem that he faced. This was the wealth that he desired to possess, and to increase, and to diffuse,—the wealth

“Of joy in widest commonalty spread.”

None of the poets has been as clear as Wordsworth in the avowal that the immediate end of poetry is pleasure. “We have no sympathy,” said he, “but what is propagated by pleasure, ... wherever we sympathise with pain, it will be found that the sympathy is produced and carried on by subtle combinations with pleasure. We have no knowledge, that is no general principles drawn from the contemplation of particular facts, but what has been built up by pleasure, and exists in us by pleasure alone.” And again: “The end of Poetry is to produce excitement, in co-existence with an over-balance of pleasure.”

But it may be clearly read in his poetry that what he means by “pleasure” is really an inward, spiritual joy. It is such a joy, in its various forms, that charms him most as he sees it in the world. His gallery of human portraits contains many figures, but every one of them is presented in the light of joy,—the rising light of dawn, or the waning light of sunset. _Lucy Gray_ and the little maid in _We are Seven_ are childish shapes of joy. The _Highland Girl_ is an embodiment of virginal gladness, and the poet cries

“Now thanks to Heaven! that of its grace Hath led me to this lovely place. _Joy have I had_; and going hence I bear away my recompence.”

Wordsworth regards joy as an actual potency of vision:

“With an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and _the deep power of joy_, We see into the heart of things.”

Joy is indeed the master-word of his poetry. The dancing daffodils enrich his heart with joy.

“They flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude; And then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with the daffodils.”

The kitten playing with the fallen leaves charms him with pure merriment. The skylark’s song lifts him up into the clouds.

“There is madness about thee, and _joy divine_ In that song of thine.”

He turns from the nightingale, that creature of a “fiery heart,” to the Stock-dove:

“He sang of love, with quiet blending, Slow to begin and never ending; Of serious faith, _and inward glee_; That was the song—the song for me.”

He thinks of love which grows to use

“_Joy as her holiest language._”

He speaks of life’s disenchantments and wearinesses as

“_All that is at enmity with joy._”

When autumn closes around him, and the season makes him conscious that his leaf is sere and yellow on the bough, he exclaims

“_Yet will I temperately rejoice_; Wide is the range and free the choice Of undiscordant themes; Which haply kindred souls may prize Not less than vernal ecstacies, And passion’s feverish dreams.”

_Temperate rejoicing_,—that is the clearest note of Wordsworth’s poetry. Not an unrestrained gladness, for he can never escape from that deep, strange experience of his youth. Often, in thought, he

“Must hear Humanity in fields and groves Pipe solitary anguish; or must hang Brooding above the fierce confederate storm Of sorrow, barricadoed evermore Within the walls of cities.”

But even while he hears these sounds he will not be “downcast or forlorn.” He will find a deeper music to conquer these clashing discords. He will learn, and teach, a hidden joy, strong to survive amid the sorrows of a world like this. He will not look for it in some far-off unrealized Utopia,

“But in the very world which is the world Of all of us,—_the place where in the end_ _We find our happiness, or not at all_!”

To this quest of joy, to this proclamation of joy, he dedicates his life.

“By words Which speak of nothing more than what we are Would I arouse the sensual from their sleep Of Death, and win the vacant and the vain _To noble raptures_.”

And herein he becomes a prophet to his age,—a prophet of the secret of joy, simple, universal, enduring,—the open secret.

The burden of Wordsworth’s prophecy of joy, as found in his poetry, is threefold. First, he declares with exultation that he has seen in Nature the evidence of a living spirit in vital correspondence with the spirit of man. Second, he expresses the deepest, tenderest feeling of the inestimable value of the humblest human life,—a feeling which through all its steadiness is yet strangely illumined by sudden gushes of penetration and pathos. Third, he proclaims a lofty ideal of the liberty and greatness of man, consisting in obedience to law and fidelity to duty.

I am careful in choosing words to describe the manner of this threefold prophesying, because I am anxious to distinguish it from didacticism. Not that Wordsworth is never didactic; for he is very often entirely and dreadfully so. But at such times he is not at his best; and it is in these long uninspired intervals that we must bear, as Walter Pater has said, “With patience the presence of an alien element in Wordsworth’s work, which never coalesced with what is really delightful in it, nor underwent his peculiar power.” Wordsworth’s genius as a poet did not always illuminate his industry as a writer. In the intervals he prosed terribly. There is a good deal of what Lowell calls “Dr. Wattsiness,” in some of his poems.

But the character of his best poems was strangely inspirational. They came to him like gifts, and he read them aloud as if wondering at their beauty. Through the protracted description of an excursion, or the careful explanation of a state of mind, he slowly plods on foot; but when he comes to the mount of vision, he mounts up with wings as an eagle. In the analysis of a character, in the narration of a simple story, he often drones, and sometimes stammers; but when the flash of insight arrives, he sings. This is the difference between the pedagogue and the prophet: the pedagogue repeats a lesson learned by rote, the prophet chants a truth revealed by vision.

III

Let me speak first of Wordsworth as a poet of Nature. The peculiar and precious quality of his best work is that it is done with his eye on the object and his imagination beyond it.

Nothing could be more accurate, more true to the facts than Wordsworth’s observation of the external world. There was an underlying steadiness, a fundamental placidity, a kind of patient, heroic obstinacy in his character, which blended with his delicate, almost tremulous sensibility, to make him rarely fitted for this work. He could look and listen long. When the magical moment of disclosure arrived, he was there and ready.

Some of his senses were not particularly acute. Odours seem not to have affected him. There are few phrases descriptive of the fragrance of nature in his poetry, and so far as I can remember none of them are vivid. He could never have written Tennyson’s line about

“The smell of violets hidden in the green.”

Nor was he especially sensitive to colour. Most of his descriptions in this region are vague and luminous, rather than precise and brilliant. Colour-words are comparatively rare in his poems. Yellow, I think, was his favourite, if we may judge by the flowers that he mentioned most frequently. Yet more than any colour he loved clearness, transparency, the diaphanous current of a pure stream, the light of sunset

“that imbues Whate’er it strikes with gem-like hues.”

But in two things his power of observation was unsurpassed, I think we may almost say, unrivalled: in sound, and in movement. For these he had what he describes in his sailor-brother,

“a watchful heart Still couchant, an inevitable ear, And an eye practiced like a blind man’s touch.”

In one of his juvenile poems, a sonnet describing the stillness of the world at twilight, he says:

“Calm is all nature as a resting wheel; The kine are couched upon the dewy grass, The horse alone seen dimly as I pass, _Is cropping audibly his evening meal_.”

At nightfall, while he is listening to the hooting of the owls and mocking them, there comes an interval of silence, and then

“a gentle shock of mild surprise _Has carried far into his heart the voice_ _Of mountain torrents_.”

At midnight, on the summit of Snowdon, from a rift in the cloud-ocean at his feet, he hears

“the roar of waters, torrents, streams Innumerable, roaring with one voice.”

Under the shadows of the great yew-trees of Borrowdalek he loves

“To lie and listen to the mountain flood _Murmuring from Glaramara’s inmost caves_.”

What could be more perfect than the little lyric which begins

“Yes, it was the mountain echo Solitary, clear, profound, Answering to the shouting cuckoo Giving to her sound for sound.”

How poignant is the touch with which he describes the notes of the fiery-hearted Nightingale, singing in the dusk:

“they pierce and pierce; Tumultuous harmony and fierce!”

But at sunrise other choristers make different melodies:

“The birds are singing in the distant woods; Over his own sweet voice the Stock-dove broods; The Jay makes answer as the Magpie chatters; And all the air is filled with pleasant noise of waters.”

Wandering into a lovely glen among the hills, he hears all the voices of nature blending together:

“The Stream, so ardent in its course before, Sent forth such sallies of glad sound that all Which I till then had heard, appeared the voice Of common pleasure: beast and bird, the lamb, The shepherd’s dog, the linnet and the thrush Vied with this waterfall, and made a song, Which while I listened, seemed like the wild growth _Or like some natural produce of the air_ _That could not cease to be_.”

Wordsworth, more than any other English poet, interprets and glorifies the mystery of sound. He is the poet who sits oftenest by the Ear-Gate listening to the whispers and murmurs of the invisible guests who throng that portal into “the city of Man-Soul.” Indeed the whole spiritual meaning of nature seems to come to him in the form of sound.

“Wonder not If high the transport, great the joy I felt, Communing in this sort through earth and heaven With every form of creature, as it looked Towards the Uncreated with a countenance Of adoration, with an eye of love. One song they sang, and it was audible, Most audible, then, when the fleshly ear, O’ercome by humblest prelude of that strain, Forgot her functions and slept undisturbed.”

No less wonderful is his sense of the delicate motions of nature, the visible transition of form and outline. How exquisite is the description of a high-poising summer-cloud,

“That heareth not the loud winds when they call; And moveth all together, if it move at all.”

He sees the hazy ridges of the mountains like a golden ladder,

“Climbing suffused with sunny air To stop—no record hath told where!”

He sees the gentle mists

“Curling with unconfirmed intent On that green mountain’s side.”

He watches the swan swimming on Lake Lucarno,—

“Behold!—as with a gushing impulse heaves That downy prow, and softly cleaves The mirror of the crystal flood, Vanish inverted hill and shadowy wood.”

He catches sight of the fluttering green linnet among the hazel-trees:

“My dazzled sight he oft deceives, A Brother of the dancing leaves.”

He looks on the meadows sleeping in the spring sunshine:

“The cattle are grazing, Their heads never raising, There are forty feeding like one!”

He beholds the far-off torrent pouring down Ben Cruachan:

“Yon foaming flood seems motionless as ice; Its dizzy turbulence eludes the eye, Frozen by distance.”

Now in such an observation of Nature as this, so keen, so patient, so loving, so delicate, there is an immediate comfort for the troubled mind, a direct refuge and repose for the heart. To see and hear such things is peace and joy. It is a consolation and an education. Wordsworth himself has said this very distinctly.

“One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man Of moral evil and of good Than all the sages can.”

But the most perfect expression of his faith in the educating power of Nature is given in one of the little group of lyrics which are bound together by the name of Lucy,—love-songs so pure and simple that they seem almost mysterious in their ethereal passion.

“Three years she grew in sun and shower, Then Nature said, ‘A lovelier flower On earth was never sown; This Child I to myself will take; She shall be mine, and I will make A Lady of my own.

Myself will to my darling be Both law and impulse; and with me The Girl, in rock and plain, In earth and heaven, in glade and bower, Shall feel an overseeing power To kindle or restrain.

...

The stars of midnight shall be dear To her; and she shall lean her ear In many a secret place Where rivulets dance their wayward round, _And beauty born of murmuring sound_ _Shall pass into her face_.’”

The personification of Nature in this poem is at the farthest removed from the traditional poetic fiction which peopled the world with Dryads and Nymphs and Oreads. Nor has it any touch of the “pathetic fallacy” which imposes the thoughts and feelings of man upon natural objects. It presents unconsciously, very simply, and yet prophetically, Wordsworth’s vision of Nature,—a vision whose distinctive marks are vitality and unity.

It is his faith that “every flower enjoys the air it breathes.” It is also his faith that underlying and animating all this joy there is the life of one mighty Spirit. This faith rises to its most magnificent expression in the famous _Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey_:

“And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thought; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.”

The union of this animating Spirit of Nature, with the beholding, contemplating, rejoicing spirit of man is like a pure and noble marriage, in which man attains peace and the spousal consummation of his being. This is the first remedy which Wordsworth finds for the malady of despair, the first and simplest burden of his prophecy of joy. And he utters it with confidence,

“Knowing that Nature never did betray The heart that loved her; ’tis her privilege, Through all the years of this our life, to lead From joy to joy: for she can so inform The mind that is within us, so impress With quietness and beauty, and so feed With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues, Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men, Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all The dreary intercourse of daily life, Shall e’er prevail against us, or disturb Our cheerful faith that all which we behold Is full of blessings.”

IV

Side by side with this revelation of Nature, and interwoven with it so closely as to be inseparable, Wordsworth was receiving a revelation of humanity, no less marvellous, no less significant for his recovery of joy. Indeed he himself seems to have thought it the more important of the two, for he speaks of the mind of man as

“My haunt and the main region of my song”;

And again he says that he will set out, like an adventurer,

“And through the human heart explore the way; And look and listen—gathering whence I may, Triumph, and thoughts no bondage can restrain.”