Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

begotten of joy was afterwards brought forth by meditation. He recollected emotion in tranquillity, and revived it in a purer form. The dross of circumstances had been refined, and thought had nourished feeling before the poet's work came to the light. The ideal had gradually evolved itself from reality.

Memory and hope are fellow-workers in Wordsworth's poetry. At the basis of what he has written lay the cheerful faith, the optimism, of his age, but modified by individual reflection. He looked forward, though in no violent revolutionary spirit, to a great destiny for mankind; he viewed the world as a high-school for the education of the individual mind; much of his poetry is occupied with the subject of the loss and the recovery of faith, hope, imaginative power, wisdom, joy; he believed, moreover, in the immortality of the human soul. But some whose temper is optimistic think scornfully of the past, and some aspirants towards a higher future life belittle the present. Wordsworth did neither. He reverenced the past; he had a sense of the continuity of human existence, both social and individual. He regarded the days of his own life, with all the modifications which sorrow and experience and deepening reflection brought, as "bound each to each by natural piety." And, in like manner, he felt that the life of a nation is a growing unity; that the old order is not to be lightly cast aside; that tradition and prescription are a precious heritage; that new institutions must grow out of those received from our fathers. The man of genius whose gaze is wholly turned to the future runs the risk of advocating freedom at the expense of order; he who lives wholly in the past may forget the expanding life of society, and become the champion of a traditional order which is incompatible with the growth of freedom. Examples of both dangers may be found in some of Wordsworth's contemporaries. Among them he

appears as a reconciler.

He knows the worth of freedom both for the individual life and for nations; but he finds the truest freedom in willing obedience to the highest law.

It cannot be said that Wordsworth, like the poets who can project themselves out of themselves in epic and dramatic work, is a poet for all readers. What is characteristic of him is the synthesis between external things and his own mind and his own mood. He draws things towards himself and meets them half way; what he writes is never purely objective. And hence he selects his audience; to enter into his work we must have something of the Wordsworthian mind and temper. We could hardly say of any one whom Shakespeare or Homer left untouched that he had a true feeling for poetry. But many genuine lovers of the poetry of Shakespeare and Homer are unmoved by that of Wordsworth; they cannot remain at the Wordsworthian standpoint, or they cannot advance towards things along the line by which he advances, and fail to reach that midway resting-place where the Wordsworthian synthesis is effected. They speak of him as an egoist; and if it be egoism never wholly to escape from one's own personality and one's own peculiar manner of regarding objects, they are right.

In disinterested intellectual curiosity Wordsworth was deficient. He could not yield himself to what did not somehow bear upon his moral nature. He was not a discursive reader; he was not deeply interested in the study of minds of a type wholly different from his own. Within a certain range he was a great critic, but as a critic he was profound rather than broad. He had little care for the scientific movement of his time; he was repelled by Goethe; he undervalued Byron; he loved and honored Scott personally, but it may be questioned whether he ever felt aright Scott's power as an interpreter of human life. The

limitation of Wordsworth's intellectual interests was to a certain extent a source of strength; it saved him from many distractions; but one who is an exclusive disciple of Wordsworth incurs some risk of narrowness. It is wise at times to descend from the mountain-height, to quit the pastoral valley, and to fare forth into the world and wave of men.

ee

[ocr errors]

He was deficient in one of the most liberalising gifts of mind a sense of humour. At rare times in his poetry, as in some passages of "Peter Bell" and some passages of The Idiot Boy," Wordsworth shows an inclination for frolic; it is the frolic of good spirits in one habitually grave, and he cannot caper lightly and gracefully. His writings in all their extent hardly show more of humour than this. He did not observe, or did not think fit to record, the details of the social comedy so freely provided for our entertainment; and having attained to his own solution of the problems of our existence, he had no feeling for those ironies and incongruities of human life which give rise to the finest kind of humour, those which are presented, for instance, so genially and so pathetically by Cervantes. He reverenced our nature, and could have no sympathy with such cruel and bitter laughter as that of Swift. At one time he attempted translations from Juvenal; but the laughter of indignation against vice and folly was not Wordsworth's mode of expressing ethical feeling. He teaches us many things; but he does not teach us how to laugh wisely and kindly. We cannot find a place for Falstaff in the scenes of "The Excursion"; and a world which excludes Falstaff is not the whole wide world; but we have excellent companions in the Pastor, the Solitary and the philosophic Pedlar; they teach us to think and to love; and thought and love should help us to laugh. If Wordsworth's seriousness of moral temper needs to be

relieved, we find such a relief in his poetry through his delight in beauty. He speaks in one of his sonnets of "the mighty ravishment of spring," and some of that vernal rapture lives in his own verse.

III.

WORDSWORTH IN RELATION TO HIS AGE.

WORDSWORTH'S originality as a poet does not consist in detachment from his age; his poetry embodies some of the leading tendencies of his time, but in passing through his mind these were purified and ennobled. The years of his early manhood were those of the great Revolutionary upheaval in France, and Wordsworth was for a time an ardent partisan on the side of the Revolution. What remained to him of that early faith after the historical development of the movement in France had alienated his sympathies? The answer to this question has been so well given by Dr Edward Caird that little need be added to his statement. Of the so-called "return to nature" in the second half of the eighteenth century, a new feeling for the wilder and grander aspects of natural beauty in the visible world was a part. Rousseau, a prophet of the Revolution, had given eloquent utterance to this feeling. Wordsworth, endowed as he was with the finest sensibility of eye and ear and possessing a poet's imagination, was peculiarly well fitted to express this sentiment. He dealt with it not in a vague rhetorical way, but with all the advantages derived from exact observation, and a close, imaginative study of the facts of the external world. And because his temper was one of sanity, he did not, in the manner of some other writers inspired by the Revolution, set up at least in his maturer work opposition between nature and human society. Half of

any

Byron's feeling for external nature lies in his recoil, sometimes rather rhetorical than real, from man and the conditions of humanity. Wordsworth, on the contrary, sees man in connection with external nature, and interprets in his poetry their spiritual interaction and coöperation.

[ocr errors]

A second note of the Revolutionary epoch is expressed by the word "simplification." This also had its exponent in Rousseau, while in English literature it found a voice through Cowper, Day (the author of "Sandford and Merton ") and other writers. It was a return to nature" from luxury, convention, ceremonial, the artificial life of courts and cities. "God made the country," said Cowper, "and man made the town." The life of the peasant was supposed to be more favorable for the true development of manhood than the life of the courtier. The Revolution did homage to man as man, and professed to strip off and despise the accidental trappings of our humanity. Dangers, however, accompanied this cry for "simplification"— the danger of sentimentality, the danger of extravagance, the danger of one-sided bitterEach of these is abundantly illustrated by the literature of the time. Wordsworth began, not with declamations against luxury, but by simplifying his own life with a view to accomplishing his proper work; "plain living and high thinking" became his rule; and therefore he could not be a sentimentalist. His strong good sense preserved him from such extravagances and crude experiments as make certain passages in the life of Thomas Day read like scenes from a comedy. He did not plead for a recovery of barbarism; simple as was his manner of living in Dove Cottage, he and his sister enjoyed the cultured delights of the mind; Spenser and Ariosto, Dante and Shakespeare were their companions; they desired to build up, not to pull down; and so they were free from bitterness. When Wordsworth's early faith in the French Revolution was lost, he did not lose his

ness.

« AnteriorContinuar »