THE PERMANENCE OF WORDSWORTH MR. NOWELL SMITH'S complete edition of Wordsworth, published by Mr. Methuen, is a tribute to the abiding power of the poet. Fashions alter in poetry, as in dress and in politics. The fashion of this world passeth away. But the one remains, while the many change and pass. Byron's verse, for all its spirited magnificence, is very far from us. Wordsworth remains. Why is this? Professor Raleigh, in one of the most beautiful and one of the most penetrating books ever devoted to a literary subject, has pronounced, and also illustrated, the true Wordsworthian faith. His book is for the multitude, and for the few. There is in it no trace of arrogance. But there are in it a thorough knowledge, an appreciation, a tender and at the same time a critical insight, which make it singular among works of its kind. Remember that some of the keenest intellects ever employed upon the dissection of poetry endeavoured to kill Wordsworth outright. Jeffrey pronounced that the Excursion would never do,' and in Jeffrey's sense it has never done. Byron rhymed about readers of the 'idiot in his glory,' who deemed the bard the hero of his story. Macaulay, though he read the Prelude through, because he read everything, considered that upon the whole Wordsworth was a bad poet; and Macaulay was nurtured on the best poets of all time. If Gladstone admired Wordsworth, it was Wordsworth the Churchman more than Wordsworth the bard. Ruskin's admiration would have been worth more if he. had not made the incredible statement that he had formed his own style upon Byron. Lord John Russell made him Poet Laureate, thus bestowing upon him an office for which he was so singularly ill-qualified that he engaged his son-in-law, Edward Quillinan, to write one of his official odes. It was not that he failed to sympathise with monarchy and the existing order. By the time that he succeeded Southey he had as long outlived the sentimental republicanism of his youth as Southey himself, and must have regarded even Lord John as a dangerous Radical. He would have taken a shorter way with Dissenters than Defoe's, and his Churchmanship, unlike that unscrupulous satirist's, was as unimpeachable as Keble's. But no man, however completely he may wreck his future, can destroy his past. The real Wordsworth, the Wordsworth of the Excursion and the Prelude, was idolised by Leslie Stephen, an aggressive Agnostic if ever there was one. Stephen was scarcely ever enthusiastic, except about Wordsworth, whom he loved as he loved the mountains, with admiration, with affection, almost with awe. By a strange and glorious coincidence Wordsworth, as well as Shakespeare, died upon St. George's Day. His patriotism was not quite as robust as Shakespeare's. In the Prelude, which, by the way, he never published, though he never retracted it, he has described how only those who felt the same reverence as himself for the village church could realise his feelings when Sunday after Sunday during the French war he knelt down with his neighbours in church, and then and there prayed for the defeat of his country. 'Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.' He was standing on the top of golden hours.' He was indeed a disciple of Charles James Fox, whose education and moral character were so entirely foreign to his tastes. I do not know that any poem better explains for those that can understand why Wordsworth keeps his hold upon the hearts of men than those lines which he wrote when he heard that Fox was dying. Well known as they are, they will bear reprinting: Loud is the Vale! the Voice is up With which she speaks when storms are gone; Of all her voices, One! Loud is the Vale; this inland Depth In peace is roaring like the sea; Yon star upon the mountain top Sad was I, even to pain deprest, Importunate and heavy load! And many thousands now are sad, Wait the fulfilment of their fear; A Power is passing from the earth To breathless Nature's dark abyss; That Man, who is from God sent forth, Doth yet again to God return ? Such ebb and flow must ever be, Then wherefore should we mourn? To praise such a poem is impertinent. We should consider and bow the head.' I am aware that Wordsworth afterwards changed the 'great and good' into the 'mighty.' He was beset in his old age by a strange and quite unnecessary sense that he might have carelessly encouraged loose living, which in Fox's case went with high thinking. But what he had written he had written, and he wrote in letters of gold. He was, as Mr. Raleigh has pointed out, the most rational of poets. He was quite entitled to say that the French Revolution had changed, not he. After the September massacres it did become a different thing. After the truce of Amiens peace was impossible. You cannot make peace with the genius of war. Fox saw that as well as Pitt, and died in office while the war was at its height. Pitt himself welcomed the Revolution in 1789 as a man, patronised it as a Whig, and ignored it as a statesman. Browning's poem, Just for a Handful of Silver he left us, if meant for Wordsworth, is quite unjust to him. He did not fear after 1793 to take the unpopular side. But when Napoleon rose, he appealed from tyranny to God. Cowper, who belonged to a Whig family, wrote forcibly and eloquently in one of his letters against that interference of Austria and Prussia with the affairs of France which led directly to the first really bloodthirsty excesses of the Revolutionists. Wordsworth's politics are of little importance now, except in so far as they show that his poetry owes nothing to the extraneous advantage of departure from right reason and the common view. It has no extraneous advantages. If it were not poetry of the very highest order, it would not be read at all. Ille se profecisse sciat cui Cicero valde placebit. What Quintilian rather pedantically wrote of the great orator one might say without pedantry of Wordsworth. He is a test. He is prosaic to the prosy, as Macaulay is shallow to the superficial. No sense of humour is required to laugh at We are Seven. Indeed, it is rather a disadvantage than otherwise. For the poem is profoundly pathetic, with the pathos of sheer simplicity, and the man who can read it aloud without tears is only fit for a London club. If anyone wants to see what Wordsworth, and only Wordsworth, was, let him first read We are Seven, and then turn to the Solitary Reaper. Both poems are equally plain in form. There is no story in either. But in We are Seven Wordsworth holds himself. In the Solitary Reaper he lets himself go. Everyone who cares for poetry at all has by heart the magical lines: Will no one tell me what she sings? Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow It may be that Wordsworth himself, though he was full of theories about poetic style, could not have told how he came to write those verses. There are times when all great poets speak, like Balaam, what the Lord puts in their mouth. But the surest way of not appreciating Wordsworth is to suppose that his greatness, his immeasurable great ness, depends upon purple passages. That might with some plausibility be said of Coleridge, true poet as he was. Such a verse as Ancestral voices prophesying war baffles all criticism, defies all analysis, and makes the reader feel that he is suddenly in presence of the sublime. It is not in that way that Wordsworth makes himself known to us. Coleridge was a dreamer of dreams, not unassisted by opium. Wordsworth was a solid mountaineer, of simple character and rugged morals, who always, or nearly always, had a moral, and yet never spoilt his poetry with it. His praise of Burns is too much qualified for the taste of some critics, who point out, not unjustly, that the English poet owed a good deal to the Scottish one. But, after all, Wordsworth knew that Burns was one of the world's supreme lyric poets. None of Burns's own countrymen, often as they sing his praises, have paid him a nobler tribute than the famous stanza : Through busiest street and loneliest glen He rules mid-winter snows, and when Deep in the general heart of men His power survives. And if any suspicion of a too unctuous piety attaches to parts the poem, it is surely removed by the closing lines: The best of what we do and are, of Professors of the New Theology might be invited to send in competitive essays on the meaning of the word 'just' in this passage. Burns's private life, as well as Fox's, must have been severely displeasing to Wordsworth. But he felt the divine fire, and had faith in its source. His own life was as blameless as any saint's in the calendar, though he does confess in the Prelude that he once drank too much wine at Cambridge. When the late Sir Francis Doyle was Professor of Poetry at Oxford, he referred to this incident, and added in a sepulchral voice, But I fear, gentlemen, that Wordsworth's standard of intoxication was deplorably low.' I doubt whether Mr. Raleigh has quite done justice to Wordsworth's classical poems. Wordsworth was no scholar in the technical sense of the term. In the eyes of the examiner, if there had been examiners in his days, his standard of scholarship would have been deplorably low. But everything suggested to him a poem. His prose, and therefore extremely prosaic, remarks on the Pillar of Trajan are delightfully characteristic. He had 'observed in the newspaper (fancy Wordsworth reading a newspaper) that the Pillar of Trajan was given as a subject for a prize poem in English verse.' He at once proposed that his son, who was at Oxford, should compete. His son, not being accustomed to write verse, wisely declined to enter on the task.' Thereupon the poet thoughtfully showed him how easily the thing might be done. It is quite true that, if Wordsworth had written nothing except the Pillar of Trajan, we should not be talking about him now. The 'lines,' as he avoids criticism by calling them, are not heroic, except in metre, nor are they interesting at all. But still, they are poetry. When Wordsworth says, in reference to Trajan's inordinate ambition: O weakness of the great! O folly of the wise! he comes perilously near to plagiarism, and is only saved by the immense superiority of Johnson's line. But take the final stanza, and I take it, for my part, the more willingly, because it is by no means a favourite specimen of Wordsworth's manner : Where now the haughty Empire that was spread, Till Rome, in silent marble unconfined, Becomes with all her years a vision of the mind. The real Wordsworth at last. Nobody else could have written those 'lines.' We are suddenly lifted out of the reflections very suitable to a prize poet, and find ourselves in that undiscovered country to which only poets who have won the prize from God Almighty know the way. And yet that is the worst, the very worst, of all Wordsworth's classical poems. He wrote it, so to speak, to order, though the order may have been his own. But what of the poem with the very unpromising title September 1819 ? when Wordsworth was supposed to be past his prime? He alludes to the subject himself: Fall, rosy garlands, from my head, Ye myrtle wreaths, your fragrance shed But, after all, though he little resembled Cleopatra in other respects, age could not wither, nor custom stale, his infinite variety. He had not the eternal youth of Goethe, Victor Hugo, Tennyson, or Browning. But when he seemed most weary, the old flash was there : For deathless powers to verse belong, On whom the Muses smile. One thinks of Quem tu Melpomene semel Nascentem placido lumine videris, |