Wordsworth

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13

"In the autumn of 1797, Mr. Coleridge, my sister, and myself started
from Alfoxden pretty late in the afternoon, with a view to visit
Linton, and the Valley of Stones near to it; and as our united funds
were very small, we agreed to defray the expense of the tour by
writing a poem, to be sent to the _New Monthly Magazine_. In the
course of this walk was planned the poem of the _Ancient Mariner_,
founded on a dream, as Mr. Coleridge said, of his friend Mr.
Cruikshank. Much the greatest part of the story was Mr. Coleridge's
invention; but certain parts I suggested; for example, some crime
was to be committed which was to bring upon the Old Navigator, as
Coleridge afterwards delighted to call him, the spectral persecution,
as a consequence of that crime and his own wanderings. I had been
reading in Shelvocke's _Voyages_, a day or two before, that, while
doubling Cape Horn they frequently saw albatrosses in that latitude,
the largest sort of sea-fowl, some extending their wings twelve or
thirteen feet, 'Suppose,' said I, 'you represent him as having
killed one of these birds on entering the South Sea, and that the
tutelary spirits of these regions take upon them to avenge the crime.
The incident was thought fit for the purpose, and adopted accordingly.
I also suggested the navigation of the ship by the dead man, but do
not recollect that I had anything more to do with the scheme of the
poem. We began the composition together, on that to me memorable
evening, I furnished two or three lines at the beginning of the poem,
in particular--"

And listened like a three years' child;
The Mariner had his will.

"As we endeavoured to proceed conjointly our respective manners
proved so widely different, that it would have been quite
presumptuous in me to do anything but separate from an undertaking
upon which I could only have been a clog. The _Ancient Mariner_ grew
and grew, till it became too important for our first object, which
was limited to our expectation of five pounds; and we began to think
of a volume, which was to consist, as Mr. Coleridge has told the
world, of poems chiefly on supernatural subjects, taken from common
life, but looked at, as much as might be, through an imaginative
medium."

The volume of _Lyrical Ballads_, whose first beginnings have here
been traced, was published in the autumn of 1798, by Mr. Cottle, at
Bristol. This volume contained several poems--which have been justly
blamed for triviality,--as _The Thorn, Goody Blake, The Idiot Boy_;
several in which, as in _Simon Lee_, triviality is mingled with much
real pathos; and some, as _Expostulation and Reply_ and _The Tables
Turned_, which are of the very essence of Wordsworth's nature. It is
hardly too much to say, that if these two last-named poems--to the
careless eye so slight and trifling--were all that had remained from
Wordsworth's hand, they would have "spoken to the comprehending" of
a new individuality, as distinct and unmistakeable in its way as
that which Sappho has left engraven on the world for ever in words
even fewer than these. And the volume ended with a poem, which
Wordsworth composed in 1798, in one day, during a tour with his
sister to Tintern and Chepstow. The _Lines written above Tintern
Abbey_ have become, as it were, the _locus classicus_ or consecrated
formulary of the Wordsworthian faith. They say in brief what it is
the work of the poet's biographer to say in detail.

As soon as this volume was published Wordsworth and his sister
sailed for Hamburg, in the hope that their imperfect acquaintance
with the German language might be improved by the heroic remedy of a
winter at Goslar. But at Goslar they do not seem to have made any
acquaintances, and their self-improvement consisted mainly in
reading German books to themselves. The four months spent at Goslar,
however, were the very bloom of Wordsworth's poetic career. Through
none of his poems has the peculiar loveliness of English scenery and
English girlhood shone more delicately than through those which came
to him as he paced the frozen gardens of that desolate city. Here it
was that he wrote _Lucy Gray_, and _Ruth_, and _Nutting_, and the
_Poet's Epitaph_, and other poems known now to most men as
possessing in its full fragrance his especial charm. And here it was
that the memory of some emotion prompted the lines on _Lucy_. Of the
history of that emotion he has told us nothing; I forbear, therefore,
to inquire concerning it, or even to speculate. That it was to the
poet's honour I do not doubt; but who ever learned such secrets
rightly? Or who should wish to learn? It is best to leave the
sanctuary of all hearts inviolate, and to respect the reserve not
only of the living but of the dead. Of these poems, almost alone,
Wordsworth in his autobiographical notes has said nothing whatever.
One of them he suppressed for years, and printed only in a later
volume. One can, indeed, well imagine that there may be poems which
a man may be willing to give to the world only in the hope that their
pathos will be, as it were, protected by its own intensity, and that
those who are worthiest to comprehend will he least disposed to
discuss them.

The autobiographical notes on his own works above alluded to were
dictated by the poet to his friend Miss Isabella Fenwick, at her
urgent request, in 1843, and preserve many interesting particulars
as to the circumstances under which each poem was composed. They are
to be found printed entire among Wordsworth's prose works, and I
shall therefore cite them only occasionally. Of _Lucy Gray_, for
instance, he says,--"It was founded on a circumstance told me by my
sister, of a little girl who, not far from Halifax, in Yorkshire,
was bewildered in a snowstorm. Her footsteps were tracked by her
parents to the middle of the lock of a canal, and no other vestige
of her, backward or forward, could be traced. The body, however, was
found in the canal. The way in which the incident was treated, and
the spiritualizing of the character, might furnish hints for
contrasting the imaginative influences which I have endeavoured to
throw over common life, with Crabbe's matter-of-fact style of
handling subjects of the same kind."

And of the _Lines written in Germany_, 1798-9,--

"A bitter winter it was when these verses were composed by the side
of my sister, in our lodgings, at a draper's house, in the romantic
imperial town of Goslar, on the edge of the Hartz forest. So severe
was the cold of this winter, that when we passed out of the parlour
warmed by the stove our cheeks were struck by the air as by cold iron.
I slept in a room over a passage that was not ceiled. The people of
the house used to say, rather unfeelingly, that they expected I
should be frozen to death some night; but with the protection of a
pelisse lined with fur, and a dog's-skin bonnet, such as was worn by
the peasants, I walked daily on the ramparts or on a sort of public
ground or garden, in which was a pond. Here I had no companion but a
kingfisher, a beautiful creature that used to glance by me. I
consequently became much attached to it. During these walks I
composed _The Poet's Epitaph_."

Seldom has there been a more impressive instance of the contrast,
familiar to biographers, between the apparent insignificance and the
real importance of their hero in undistinguished youth. To any one
considering Wordsworth as he then was,--a rough and somewhat
stubborn young man, who, in nearly thirty years of life, had seemed
alternately to idle without grace and to study without advantage,--
it might well have seemed incredible that he could have anything new
or valuable to communicate to mankind. Where had been his experience?
Or where was the indication of that wealth of sensuous emotion which
in such a nature as Keats' seems almost to dispense with experience
and to give novelty by giving vividness to such passions as are
known to all? If Wordsworth were to impress mankind it must be, one
might have thought, by travelling out of himself altogether--by
revealing some such energy of imagination as can create a world of
romance and adventure in the shyest heart. But this was not so to be.
Already Wordsworth's minor poems had dealt almost entirely with his
own feelings, and with the objects actually before his eyes; and it
was at Goslar that he planned, and on the day of his quitting Goslar
that he began, a much longer poem, whose subject was to be still
more intimately personal, being the development of his own mind. This
poem, dedicated to Coleridge, and written in the form of a
confidence bestowed on an intimate friend, was finished in 1805, but
was not published till after the poet's death. Mrs. Wordsworth then
named it _The Prelude_, indicating thus the relation which it bears
to the _Excursion_--or rather, to the projected poem of the _Recluse_,
of which the _Excursion_ was to form only the Second out of three
Divisions. One Book of the First Division of the _Recluse_ was
written, but is yet unpublished; the Third Division was never even
begun, and "the materials," we are told, "of which it would have
been formed have been incorporated, for the most part, in the
author's other publications." Nor need this change of plan be
regretted: didactic poems admit easily of mutilation; and all that
can be called plot in this series of works is contained in the
_Prelude_, in which we see Wordsworth arriving at those convictions
which in the _Excursion_ he pauses to expound.

It would be too much to say that Wordsworth has been wholly
successful in the attempt--for such the _Prelude_ virtually is--to
write an epic poem on his own education. Such a poem must almost
necessarily appear tedious and egoistic, and Wordsworth's manner has
not tact enough to prevent these defects from being felt to the full.
On the contrary, in his constant desire frugally to extract, as it
were, its full teaching from the minutest event which has befallen
him, he supplements the self-complacency of the autobiographer with
the conscientious exactness of the moralist, and is apt to insist on
trifles such as lodge in the corners of every man's memory, as if
they were unique lessons vouchsafed to himself alone.

Yet it follows from this very temper of mind that there is scarcely
any autobiography which we can read with such implicit confidence as
the _Prelude_. In the case of this, as of so many of Wordsworth's
productions, our first dissatisfaction at the form which the poem
assumes yields to a recognition of its fitness to express precisely
what the poet intends. Nor are there many men who, in recounting the
story of their own lives, could combine a candour so absolute with
so much of dignity--who could treat their personal history so
impartially as a means of conveying lessons of general truth--or who,
while chronicling such small things, could remain so great. The
_Prelude_ is a book of good augury for human nature. We feel in
reading it as if the stock of mankind were sound. The soul seems
going on from strength to strength by the mere development of her
inborn power. And the scene with which the poem at once opens and
concludes--the return to the Lake country as to a permanent and
satisfying home--places the poet at last amid his true surroundings,
and leaves us to contemplate him as completed by a harmony without
him, which he of all men most needed to evoke the harmony within.

CHAPTER IV.

THE ENGLISH LAKES.

The lakes and mountains of Cumberland, Westmoreland, and Lancashire,
are singularly fitted to supply such elements of moral sustenance as
Nature's aspects can afford to man. There are, indeed, many mountain
regions of greater awfulness; but prospects of ice and terror should
be a rare stimulant rather than an habitual food; and the physical
difficulties inseparable from immense elevations depress the
inhabitant and preoccupy the traveller. There are many lakes under a
more lustrous sky; but the healthy activities of life demand a scene
brilliant without languor, and a beauty which can refresh and satisfy
rather than lull or overpower. Without advancing any untenable claim
to British pre-eminence in the matter of scenery, we may, perhaps,
follow on both these points the judgment which Wordsworth has
expressed in his _Guide to the Lakes_, a work which condenses the
results of many years of intimate observation.

"Our tracts of wood and water," he says, "are almost diminutive in
comparison (with Switzerland); therefore, as far as sublimity is
dependent upon absolute bulk and height, and atmospherical
influences in connexion with these, it is obvious that there can be
no rivalship. But a short residence among the British mountains will
furnish abundant proof, that, after a certain point of elevation, viz.,
that which allows of compact and fleecy clouds settling upon, or
sweeping over, the summits, the sense of sublimity depends more upon
form and relation of objects to each other than upon their actual
magnitude; and that an elevation of 3000 feet is sufficient to call
forth in a most impressive degree the creative, and magnifying, and
softening powers of the atmosphere."

And again, as to climate; "The rain," he says, "here comes down
heartily, and is frequently succeeded by clear bright weather, when
every brook is vocal, and every torrent sonorous; brooks and
torrents which are never muddy even in the heaviest floods. Days of
unsettled weather, with partial showers, are very frequent; but the
showers, darkening or brightening as they fly from hill to hill, are
not less grateful to the eye than finely interwoven passages of gay
and sad music are touching to the ear. Vapours exhaling from the
lakes and meadows after sunrise in a hot season, or in moist weather
brooding upon the heights, or descending towards the valleys with
inaudible motion, give a visionary character to everything around
them; and are in themselves so beautiful as to dispose us to enter
into the feelings of those simple nations (such as the Laplanders of
this day) by whom they are taken for guardian deities of the
mountains; or to sympathize with others who have fancied these
delicate apparitions to be the spirits of their departed ancestors.
Akin to these are fleecy clouds resting upon the hill-tops; they are
not easily managed in picture, with their accompaniments of blue sky,
but how glorious are they in nature! How pregnant with imagination
for the poet! And the height of the Cumbrian mountains is sufficient
to exhibit daily and hourly instances of those mysterious attachments.
Such clouds, cleaving to their stations, or lifting up suddenly
their glittering heads from behind rocky barriers, or hurrying out
of sight with speed of the sharpest edge, will often tempt an
inhabitant to congratulate himself on belonging to a country of mists
and clouds and storms, and make him think of the blank sky of Egypt,
and of the cerulean vacancy of Italy, as an unanimated and even a
sad spectacle."

The consciousness of a preceding turmoil brings home to us best the
sense of perfect peace; and a climate accustomed to storm-cloud and
tempest can melt sometimes into "a day as still as heaven" with a
benignant tranquillity which calmer regions can scarcely know. Such
a day Wordsworth has described in language of such delicate truth
and beauty as only a long and intimate love can inspire:

"It has been said that in human life there are moments worth ages.
In a more subdued tone of sympathy may we affirm, that in the
climate of England there are, for the lover of Nature, days which
are worth whole months, I might say, even years. One of these
favoured days sometimes occurs in springtime, when that soft air is
breathing over the blossoms and new-born verdure which inspired
Buchanan with his beautiful Ode to the First of May; the air which,
in the luxuriance of his fancy, he likens to that of the golden age,--
to that which gives motion to the funereal cypresses on the banks of
Lethe; to the air which is to salute beatified spirits when
expiatory fires shall have consumed the earth with all her
habitations. But it is in autumn that days of such affecting
influence most frequently intervene. The atmosphere seems refined,
and the sky rendered more crystalline, as the vivifying heat of the
year abates; the lights and shadows are more delicate; the colouring
is richer and more finely harmonized; and, in this season of
stillness, the ear being unoccupied, or only gently excited, the
sense of vision becomes more susceptible of its appropriate
enjoyments. A resident in a country like this which we are treating
of will agree with me that the presence of a lake is indispensable to
exhibit in perfection the beauty of one of these days; and he must
have experienced, while looking on the unruffled waters, that the
imagination by their aid is carried into recesses of feeling
otherwise impenetrable. The reason of this is, that the heavens are
not only brought down into the bosom of the earth, but that the
earth is mainly looked at, and thought of, through the medium of a
purer element. The happiest time is when the equinoctial gales are
departed; but their fury may probably be called to mind by the sight
of a few shattered boughs, whose leaves do not differ in colour from
the faded foliage of the stately oaks from which these relics of the
storm depend: all else speaks of tranquillity; not a breath of air,
no restlessness of insects, and not a moving object perceptible--
except the clouds gliding in the depths of the lake, or the
traveller passing along, an inverted image, whose motion seems
governed by the quiet of a time to which its archetype, the living
person, is perhaps insensible; or it may happen that the figure of
one of the larger birds, a raven or a heron, is crossing silently
among the reflected clouds, while the voice of the real bird, from
the element aloft, gently awakens in the spectator the recollection
of appetites and instincts, pursuits and occupations, that deform
and agitate the world, yet have no power to prevent nature from
putting on an aspect capable of satisfying the most intense cravings
for the tranquil, the lovely, and the perfect, to which man, the
noblest of her creatures, is subject."

The scene described here is one as exquisite in detail as majestic
in general effect. And it is characteristic of the region to which
Wordsworth's love was given that there is no corner of it without a
meaning and a charm; that the open record of its immemorial past
tells us at every turn that all agencies have conspired for
loveliness and ruin itself has been benign. A passage of Wordsworth's
describing the character of the lake-shores illustrates this fact
with loving minuteness.

"Sublimity is the result of nature's first great dealings with
the superficies of the Earth; but the general tendency of her
subsequent operations is towards the production of beauty, by
a multiplicity of symmetrical parts uniting in a consistent
whole. This is everywhere exemplified along the margins of
these lakes. Masses of rock, that have been precipitated from
the heights into the area of waters, lie in some places like
stranded ships, or have acquired the compact structure of jutting
piers, or project in little peninsulas crested with native wood.
The smallest rivulet, one whose silent influx is scarcely
noticeable in a season of dry weather, so faint is the dimple made
by it on the surface of the smooth lake, will be found to have
been not useless in shaping, by its deposits of gravel and soil
in time of flood, a curve that would not otherwise have existed.
But the more powerful brooks, encroaching upon the level of the
lake, have, in course of time, given birth to ample promontories
of sweeping outline, that contrast boldly with the longitudinal
base of the steeps on the opposite shore; while their flat or
gently-sloping surfaces never fail to introduce, into the midst of
desolation and barrenness, the elements of fertility, even where
the habitations of men may not have been raised."

With this we may contrast, as a companion picture, the poet's
description of the tarns, or lonely bodies of water, which lie here
and there among the hills:

"They are difficult of access and naked; yet some of them
are, in their permanent forms, very grand, and there are accidents
of things which would make the meanest of them interesting.
At all events, one of these pools is an acceptable sight to
the mountain wanderer, not merely as an incident that diversifies
the prospect, but as forming in his mind a centre or conspicuous
point to which objects, otherwise disconnected or insubordinated,
may be referred. Some few have a varied outline,
with bold heath-clad promontories; and as they mostly lie at the
foot of a steep precipice, the water, where the sun is not shining
upon it, appears black and sullen, and round the margin huge
stones and masses of rock are scattered, some defying conjecture
as to the means by which they came thither, and others
obviously fallen from on high, the contribution of ages! A not
unpleasing sadness is induced by this perplexity, and these
images of decay; while the prospect of a body of pure water,
unattended with groves and other cheerful rural images by
which fresh water is usually accompanied, and unable to give
furtherance to the meagre vegetation around it, excites a sense
of some repulsive power strongly put forth, and thus deepens
the melancholy natural to such scenes."

To those who love to deduce the character of a population from the
character of their race and surroundings the peasantry of Cumberland
and Westmoreland form an attractive theme. Drawn in great part from
the strong Scandinavian stock, they dwell in a land solemn and
beautiful as Norway itself, but without Norway's rigour and penury,
and with still lakes and happy rivers instead of Norway's inarming
melancholy sea. They are a mountain folk; but their mountains are no
precipices of insuperable snow, such as keep the dwellers in some
Swiss hamlet shut in ignorance and stagnating into idiocy. These
barriers divide only to concentrate, and environ only to endear;
their guardianship is but enough to give an added unity to each
group of kindred homes. And thus it is that the Cumbrian dalesmen
have afforded perhaps as near a realization as human fates have yet
allowed of the rural society which statesmen desire for their
country's greatness. They have given an example of substantial
comfort strenuously won; of home affections intensified by
independent strength; of isolation without ignorance, and of a
shrewd simplicity; of an hereditary virtue which needs no support
from fanaticism, and to which honour is more than law.

The school of political economists, moreover, who urge the advantage
of a peasant proprietary--of small independent holdings,--as at once
drawing from the land the fullest produce and rearing upon it the
most vigorous and provident population,--this school, as is well
known, finds in the _statesmen_ of Cumberland one of its favourite
examples. In the days of border-wars, when the first object was to
secure the existence of as many armed men as possible, in readiness
to repel the Scot, the abbeys and great proprietors in the north
readily granted small estates on military tenure, which tenure, when
personal service in the field was no longer needed, became in most
cases an absolute ownership. The attachment of these _statesmen_ to
their hereditary estates, the heroic efforts which they would make
to avoid parting with them, formed an impressive phenomenon in the
little world--a world at once of equality and of conservatism--which
was the scene of Wordsworth's childish years, and which remained his
manhood's ideal.

The growth of large fortunes in England, and the increased
competition for land, has swallowed up many of these small
independent holdings in the extensive properties of wealthy men. And
at the same time the spread of education, and the improved poor-laws
and other legislation, by raising the condition of other parts of
England, have tended to obliterate the contrast which was so marked
in Wordsworth's day. How marked that contrast was, a comparison of
Crabbe's poems with Wordsworth's will sufficiently indicate. Both
are true painters; but while in the one we see poverty as something
gross and degrading, and the _Tales of the Village_ stand out from a
background of pauperism and crime; in the other picture poverty
means nothing worse than privation, and the poet in the presence of
the most tragic outcast of fortune could still

Have laughed himself to scorn, to find
In that decrepit man so firm a mind.[3]

[Footnote 3: The previous page ends midsentence, within an ordinary
paragraph, sentence finished by this verse (probably an excerpt from
a poem).]

Nay, even when a state far below the _Leech-Gatherer's_ has been
reached, and mind and body alike are in their last decay, the life
of the _Old Cumberland Beggar_, at one remove from nothingness, has
yet a dignity and a usefulness of its own. His fading days are
passed in no sad asylum of vicious or gloomy age, but amid
neighbourly kindnesses, and in the sanity of the open air; and a life
that is reduced to its barest elements has yet a hold on the
liberality of nature and the affections of human hearts.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13