Wordsworth

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To illustrate the inadequacy of Wordsworth's theory to explain the
merits of his own poetry, I select a stanza from one of his simplest
and most characteristic poems--_The Affliction of Margaret_:--

Perhaps some dungeon hears thee groan,
Maimed, mangled by inhuman men,
Or thou upon a Desert thrown
Inheritest the lion's Den;
Or hast been summoned to the Deep,
Thou, thou and all thy mates, to keep
An incommunicable sleep.

These lines, supposed to be uttered by "a poor widow at Penrith,"
afford a fair illustration of what Wordsworth calls "the language
really spoken by men," with "metre superadded." "What other
distinction from prose," he asks, "would we have?" We may answer
that we would have what he has actually given us, viz., an
appropriate and attractive music, lying both in the rhythm and in the
actual sound of the words used,--a music whose complexity may be
indicated here by drawing out some of its elements in detail, at the
risk of appearing pedantic and technical. We observe, then (_a_),
that the general movement of the lines is unusually slow. They
contain a very large proportion of strong accents and long vowels,
to suit the tone of deep and despairing sorrow. In six places only
out of twenty-eight is the accent weak where it might be expected to
be strong (in the second syllables, namely, of the Iambic foot), and
in each of these cases the omission of a possible accent throws
greater weight on the next succeeding accent--on the accents, that
is to say, contained in the words inhuman, desert, lion, summoned,
deep, and sleep, (_b_) The first four lines contain subtle
alliterations of the letters d, h, m, and th. In this connexion it
should be remembered that when consonants are thus repeated at the
beginning of syllables, those syllables need not be at the beginning
of words; and further, that repetitions scarcely more numerous than
chance alone would have occasioned, may be so placed by the poet as
to produce a strongly-felt effect. If any one doubts the
effectiveness of the unobvious alliterations here insisted on, let
him read (1) "jungle" for "desert," (2) "maybe" for "perhaps,"
(3) "tortured" for "mangled," (4) "blown" for "thrown," and he will
become sensible of the lack of the metrical support which the
existing consonants give one another. The three last lines contain
one or two similar alliterations on which I need not dwell,
(_c_) The words _inheritest_ and _summoned_ are by no means such as
"a poor widow," even at Penrith, would employ; they are used to
intensify the imagined relation which connects the missing man with
(1) the wild beasts who surround him, and (2) the invisible Power
which leads; so that something mysterious and awful is added to his
fate. (_d_) This impression is heightened by the use of the
word _incommunicable_ in an unusual sense, "incapable of being
communicated _with_," instead of "incapable of being communicated;"
while (_e_) the expression "to keep an incommunicable sleep" for
"to lie dead," gives dignity to the occasion by carrying the mind
back along a train of literary associations of which the well-known
[Greek: atermona naegreton upnon] of Moschus may be taken as the type.

We must not, of course, suppose that Wordsworth consciously sought
these alliterations, arranged these accents, resolved to introduce
an unusual word in the last line, or hunted for a classical allusion.
But what the poet's brain does not do consciously it does
unconsciously; a selective action is going on in its recesses
simultaneously with the overt train of thought, and on the degree of
this unconscious suggestiveness the richness and melody of the
poetry will depend.

So rules can secure the attainment of these effects; and the very
same artifices which are delightful when used by one man seem
mechanical and offensive when used by another. Nor is it by any
means always the case that the man who can most delicately
appreciate the melody of the poetry of others will be able to
produce similar melody himself. Nay, even if he can produce it one
year it by no means follows that he will be able to produce it the
next. Of all qualifications for writing poetry this inventive music
is the most arbitrarily distributed, and the most evanescent. But it
is the more important to dwell on its necessity, inasmuch as both
good and bad poets are tempted to ignore it. The good poet prefers
to ascribe his success to higher qualities; to his imagination,
elevation of thought, descriptive faculty. The bad poet can more
easily urge that his thoughts are too advanced for mankind to
appreciate than that his melody is too sweet for their ears to catch.
And when the gift vanishes no poet is willing to confess that it is
gone; so humiliating is it to lose power over mankind by the loss of
something which seems quite independent of intellect or character.
And yet so it is. For some twenty years at most (1798--1818),
Wordsworth possessed this gift of melody. During those years he
wrote works which profoundly influenced mankind. The gift then left
him; he continued as wise and as earnest as ever, but his poems had
no longer any potency, nor his existence much public importance.

Humiliating as such reflections may seem, they are in accordance
with actual experience in all branches of art. The fact is that the
pleasures which art gives us are complex in the extreme. We are
always disposed to dwell on such of their elements as are explicable
and can in some way be traced to moral or intellectual sources. But
they contain also other elements which are inexplicable, non-moral,
and non-intellectual, and which render most of our attempted
explanations of artistic merit so incomplete as to be practically
misleading. Among such incomplete explanations Wordsworth's essays
must certainly be ranked. It would not be safe for any man to
believe that he had produced true poetry because he had fulfilled
the conditions which Wordsworth lays down. But the essays effected
what is perhaps as much as the writer on art can fairly hope to
accomplish. They placed in a striking light that side of the subject
which had been too long ignored; they aided in recalling an art
which had become conventional and fantastic into the normal current
of English thought and speech.

It may be added that both in doctrine and practice Wordsworth
exhibits a progressive reaction from the extreme views with which he
starts towards the common vein of good sense and sound judgment
which may be traced back to Horace, Longinus, and Aristotle. His
first preface is violently polemic. He attacks with reason that
conception of the sublime and beautiful which is represented by
Dryden's picture of "Cortes alone in his nightgown," remarking that
"the mountains seem to nod their drowsy heads." But the only example
of true poetry which he sees fit to adduce in contrast consists in a
stanza from the _Babes in the Wood_. In his preface of 1815 he is
not less severe on false sentiment and false observation. But his
views of the complexity and dignity of poetry have been much
developed, and he is willing now to draw his favourable instances
from Shakespeare, Milton, Virgil, and himself.

His own practice underwent a corresponding change. It is only to
a few poems of his earlier years that the famous parody of the
_Rejected Addresses_ fairly applies.

My father's walls are made of brick,
But not so tall and not so thick
As these; and goodness me!
My father's beams are made of wood,
But never, never half so good
As those that now I see!

Lines something like these might have occurred in _The Thorn_ or
_The Idiot Boy_. Nothing could be more different from the style of
the sonnets, or of the _Ode to Duty_, or of _Laodamia_. And yet both
the simplicity of the earlier and the pomp of the later poems were
almost always noble; nor is the transition from the one style to the
other a perplexing or abnormal thing. For all sincere styles are
congruous to one another, whether they be adorned or no, as all high
natures are congruous to one another, whether in the garb of peasant
or of prince. What is incongruous to both is affectation, vulgarity,
egoism; and while the noble style can be interchangeably childlike
or magnificent, as its theme requires, the ignoble can neither
simplify itself into purity nor deck itself into grandeur.

It need not, therefore, surprise us to find the classical models
becoming more and more dominant in Wordsworth's mind, till the poet
of _Poor Susan_ and _The Cuckoo_ spends months over the attempt to
translate the _Æneid_,--to win the secret of that style which he
placed at the head of all poetic styles, and of those verses which
"wind," as he says, "with the majesty of the Conscript Fathers
entering the Senate-house in solemn procession," and envelope in
their imperial melancholy all the sorrows and the fates of man.

And, indeed, so tranquil and uniform was the life which we are now
retracing, and at the same time so receptive of any noble influence
which opportunity might bring, that a real epoch is marked in
Wordsworth's poetical career by the mere re-reading of some Latin
authors in 1814-16 with a view to preparing his eldest son for the
University. Among the poets whom he thus studied was one in whom he
might seem to discern his own spirit endowed with grander proportions,
and meditating on sadder fates. Among the poets of the battlefield,
of the study, of the boudoir, he encountered the first Priest of
Nature, the first poet in Europe who had deliberately shunned the
life of courts and cities for the mere joy in Nature's presence, for
"sweet Parthenope and the fields beside Vesevus' hill."

There are, indeed, passages in the _Georgics_ so Wordsworthian, as
we now call it, in tone, that it is hard to realize what centuries
separated them from the _Sonnet to Lady Beaumont or from Ruth_. Such,
for instance, is the picture of the Corycian old man, who had made
himself independent of the seasons by his gardening skill, so that
"when gloomy winter was still rending the stones with frost, still
curbing with ice the rivers' onward flow, he even then was plucking
the soft hyacinth's bloom, and chid the tardy summer and delaying
airs of spring." Such, again, is the passage where the poet breaks
from the glories of successful industry into the delight of watching
the great processes which nature accomplishes untutored and alone,
"the joy of gazing on Cytorus waving with boxwood, and on forests of
Narycian pine, on tracts that never felt the harrow, nor knew the
care of man."

Such thoughts as these the Roman and the English poet had in common;--
the heritage of untarnished souls.

I asked; 'twas whispered; The device
To each and all might well belong:
It is the Spirit of Paradise
That prompts such work, a Spirit strong,
That gives to all the self-same bent
Where life is wise and innocent.

It is not only in tenderness but in dignity that the "wise and
innocent" are wont to be at one. Strong in tranquillity, they can
intervene amid great emotions with a master's voice, and project on
the storm of passion the clear light of their unchanging calm. And
thus it was that the study of Virgil, and especially of Virgil's
solemn picture of the Underworld, prompted in Wordsworth's mind the
most majestic of his poems, his one great utterance on heroic love.

He had as yet written little on any such topic as this. At Goslar he
had composed the poems on _Lucy_ to which allusion has already been
made. And after his happy marriage he had painted in one of the best
known of his poems the sweet transitions of wedded love, as it moves
on from the first shock and agitation of the encounter of
predestined souls through all tendernesses of intimate affection
into a pervading permanency and calm.

Scattered, moreover, throughout his poems are several passages in
which the passion is treated with similar force and truth. The poem
which begins "'Tis said that some have died for love" depicts the
enduring poignancy of bereavement with an "iron pathos" that is
almost too strong for art. And something of the same power of
clinging attachment is shown in the sonnet where the poet is stung
with the thought that "even for the least division of an hour" he
has taken pleasure in the life around him, without the accustomed
tacit reference to one who has passed away. There is a brighter
touch of constancy in that other sonnet where, after letting his
fancy play over a glad imaginary past, he turns to his wife, ashamed
that even in so vague a vision he could have shaped for himself a
solitary joy.

Let _her_ be comprehended in the frame
Of these Illusions, or they please no more.

In later years the two sonnets on his wife's picture set on that
love the consecration of faithful age; and there are those who can
recall his look as he gazed on the picture and tried to recognize in
that aged face the Beloved who to him was ever young and fair,--a
look as of one dwelling in life-long affections with the
unquestioning single-heartedness of a child.

And here it might have been thought that as his experience ended his
power of description would have ended too. But it was not so. Under
the powerful stimulus of the sixth _Æneid_--allusions to which
pervade _Laodamia_ [5] throughout--with unusual labour, and by a
strenuous effort of the imagination, Wordsworth was enabled to
depict his own love _in excelsis_, to imagine what aspect it might
have worn, if it had been its destiny to deny itself at some heroic
call, and to confront with nobleness an extreme emergency, and to be
victor (as Plato has it) in an Olympian contest of the soul. For,
indeed, the "fervent, not ungovernable, love," which is the ideal
that Protesilaus is sent to teach, is on a great scale the same
affection which we have been considering in domesticity and peace;
it is love considered not as a revolution but as a consummation; as
a self-abandonment not to a laxer but to a sterner law; no longer as
an invasive passion, but as the deliberate habit of the soul. It is
that conception of love which springs into being in the last canto of
Dante's _Purgatory_,--which finds in English chivalry a noble voice,--

I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not honour more.

[Footnote 5: _Laodamia_ should be read (as it is given in
Mr. Matthew Arnold's admirable volume of selections) with the _earlier_
conclusion: the _second_ form is less satisfactory, and the _third_,
with its sermonizing tone, "thus all in vain exhorted and reproved,"
is worst of all.]

For, indeed, (even as Plato says that Beauty is the splendour of
Truth,) so such a Love as this is the splendour of Virtue; it is the
unexpected spark that flashes from self-forgetful soul to soul, it
is man's standing evidence that he "must lose himself to find himself,"
and that only when the veil of his personality has lifted from around
him can he recognize that he is already in heaven.

In a second poem inspired by this revived study of classical
antiquity Wordsworth has traced the career of Dion,--the worthy
pupil of Plato, the philosophic ruler of Syracuse, who allowed
himself to shed blood unjustly, though for the public good, and was
haunted by a spectre symbolical of this fatal error. At last Dion
was assassinated, and the words in which the poet tells his fate seem
to me to breathe the very triumph of philosophy, to paint with a
touch the greatness of a spirit which makes of Death himself a
deliverer, and has its strength in the unseen.

So were the hopeless troubles, that involved
The soul of Dion, instantly dissolved.

I can only compare these lines to that famous passage of Sophocles
where the lamentations of the dying Oedipus are interrupted by the
impatient summons of an unseen accompanying god. In both places the
effect is the same; to present to us with striking brevity the
contrast between the visible and the invisible presences that may
stand about a man's last hour; for he may feel with the desolate
Oedipus that "all I am has perished"--he may sink like Dion through
inextricable sadness to a disastrous death, and then in a moment the
transitory shall disappear and the essential shall be made plain,
and from Dioa's upright spirit the perplexities shall vanish away,
and Oedipus, in the welcome of that unknown companionship, shall
find his expiations over and his reward begun.

It is true, no doubt, that when Wordsworth wrote these poems he had
lost something of the young inimitable charm which fills such pieces
as the _Fountain_ or the _Solitary Reaper_. His language is majestic,
but it is no longer magical. And yet we cannot but feel that he has
put into these poems something which he could not have put into the
poems which preceded them; that they bear the impress of a soul
which has added moral effort to poetic inspiration, and is mistress
now of the acquired as well as of the innate virtue. For it is words
like these that are the strength and stay of men; nor can their
accent of lofty earnestness be simulated by the writer's art.
Literary skill may deceive the reader who seeks a literary pleasure
alone; and he to whom these strong consolations are a mere
imaginative luxury may be uncertain or indifferent out of what heart
they come. But those who need them know; spirits that hunger after
righteousness discern their proper food; there is no fear lest they
confound the sentimental and superficial with those weighty
utterances of moral truth which are the most precious legacy that a
man can leave to mankind.

Thus far, then, I must hold that although much of grace had already
vanished there was on the whole a progress and elevation in the mind
of him of whom we treat. But the culminating point is here. After
this--whatever ripening process may have been at work unseen--what
is chiefly visible is the slow stiffening of the imaginative power,
the slow withdrawal of the insight into the soul of things, and a
descent--[Greek: ablaechros mala tsios]--"soft as soft can be,"
to the euthanasy of a death that was like sleep.

The impression produced by Wordsworth's reperusal of Virgil in
1814-16 was a deep and lasting one. In 1829-30 he devoted much time
and labour to a translation of the first three books of the _Æneid_,
and it is interesting to note the gradual modification of his views
as to the true method of rendering poetry.

"I have long been persuaded," he writes to Lord Lonsdale in 1829,
"that Milton formed his blank verse upon the model of the _Georgics_
and the _Æneid_, and I am so much struck with this resemblance, that
I should, have attempted Virgil in blank verse, had I not been
persuaded that no ancient author can with advantage be so rendered.
Their religion, their warfare, their course of action and feeling,
are too remote from modern interest to allow it. We require every
possible help and attraction of sound in our language to smooth the
way for the admission of things so remote from our present concerns.
My own notion of translation is, that it cannot be too literal,
provided these faults be avoided: _baldness_, in which I include all
that takes from dignity; and strangeness, or uncouthness, including
harshness; and lastly, attempts to convey meanings which, as they
cannot be given but by languid circumlocutions, cannot in fact be
said to be given at all.... I feel it, however, to be too probable
that my translation is deficient in ornament, because I must
unavoidably have lost many of Virgil's, and have never without
reluctance attempted a compensation of my own."

The truth of this last self-criticism is very apparent from
the fragments of the translation which were published in the
_Philological Museum_; and Coleridge, to whom the whole manuscript
was submitted, justly complains of finding "page after page without
a single brilliant note;" and adds, "Finally, my conviction is that
you undertake an impossibility, and that there is no medium between a
pure version and one on the avowed principle of _compensation_ in
the widest sense, i.e. manner, genius, total effect; I confine
myself to _Virgil_ when I say this." And it appears that Wordsworth
himself came round to this view, for in reluctantly sending a
specimen of his work to the _Philological Museum_ in 1832, he says,--

"Having been displeased in modern translations with the
additions of incongruous matter, I began to translate with a
resolve to keep clear of that fault by adding nothing; but I
became convinced that a spirited translation can scarcely be
accomplished in the English language without admitting a
principle of compensation."

There is a curious analogy between the experiences of Cowper and
Wordsworth in the way of translation. Wordsworth's translation of
Virgil was prompted by the same kind of reaction against the
reckless laxity of Dryden as that which inspired Cowper against the
distorting artificiality of Pope. In each case the new translator
cared more for his author and took a much higher view of a
translator's duty than his predecessor had done. But in each case
the plain and accurate translation was a failure, while the loose
and ornate one continued to be admired. We need not conclude from
this that the wilful inaccuracy of Pope or Dryden would be any
longer excusable in such a work. But on the other hand we may
certainly feel that nothing is gained by rendering an ancient poet
into verse at all unless that verse be of a quality to give a
pleasure independent of the faithfulness of the translation which it
conveys.

The translations and _Laodamia_ are not the only indications of the
influence which Virgil exercised over Wordsworth. Whether from mere
similarity of feeling, or from more or less conscious recollection,
there are frequent passages in the English which recall the Roman
poet. Who can hear Wordsworth describe how a poet on the island in
Grasmere

At noon

Spreads out his limbs, while, yet unshorn, the sheep,
Panting beneath the burthen of their wool
Lie round him, even as if they were a part
Of his own household:--

and not think of the stately tenderness of Virgil's

Stant et oves circum; nostri nee poenitet illas--

and the flocks of Arcady that gather round in sympathy with the
lovelorn Gallus' woe?

So again the well-known lines--

Not seldom, clad in radiant vest,
Deceitfully goes forth the Morn;
Not seldom Evening in the west
Sinks smilingly forsworn,--

are almost a translation of Palinurus' remonstrance with "the
treachery of tranquil heaven." And when the poet wishes for any link
which could bind him closer to the Highland maiden who has flitted
across his path as a being of a different world from his own:--

Thine elder Brother would I be,
Thy Father, anything to thee!--

we hear the echo of the sadder plaint--

Atque utinam e vobis unus--

when the Roman statesman longs to be made one with the simple life
of shepherd or husbandman, and to know their undistracted joy.

Still more impressive is the shock of surprise with which we read in
Wordsworth's poem on Ossian the following lines:--

Musæus, stationed with his lyre
Supreme among the Elysian quire,
Is, for the dwellers upon earth,
Mute as a lark ere morning's birth,

and perceive that he who wrote them has entered--where no
commentator could conduct him--into the solemn pathos of Virgil's
_Musaeum ante omnis_--; where the singer whose very existence upon
earth has become a legend and a mythic name is seen keeping in the
underworld his old pre-eminence, and towering above the blessed dead.

This is a stage in Wordsworth's career on which his biographer is
tempted unduly to linger. For we have reached the Indian summer of
his genius; it can still shine at moments bright as ever, and with
even a new majesty and calm; but we feel, nevertheless, that the
melody is dying from his song; that he is hardening into
self-repetition, into rhetoric, into sermonizing common-place, and
is rigid where he was once profound. The _Thanksgiving Ode_ (1816)
strikes death to the heart. The accustomed patriotic sentiments--the
accustomed virtuous aspirations--these are still there; but the
accent is like that of a ghost who calls to us in hollow mimicry of a
voice that once we loved.

And yet Wordsworth's poetic life was not to close without a great
symbolical spectacle, a solemn farewell. Sunset among the Cumbrian
hills, often of remarkable beauty, once or twice, perhaps, in a
score of years, reaches a pitch of illusion and magnificence which
indeed seems nothing less than the commingling of earth and heaven.
Such a sight--seen from Rydal Mount in 1818--afforded once more the
needed stimulus, and evoked that "_Evening Ode, composed on an
evening of extraordinary splendour and beauty_," which is the last
considerable production of Wordsworth's genius. In this ode we
recognize the peculiar gift of reproducing with magical simplicity
as it were the inmost virtue of natural phenomena.

No sound is uttered, but a deep
And solemn harmony pervades
The hollow vale from steep to steep,
And penetrates the glades.
Far distant images draw nigh,
Called forth by wondrous potency
Of beamy radiance, that imbues
Whate'er it strikes, with gem-like hues!
In vision exquisitely clear
Herds range along the mountain side;
And glistening antlers are descried,
And gilded flocks appear.

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