Chapter V: Part 5

for Wordsworth had not the faintest wish to see his countrymen the lords of human kind, nor is there anything vulgar in his patriotism; but there _is_ pride in his port and defiance in his eye. And, lastly, the character of his ideal and of this national pride, with him as with Milton, is connected with personal traits,--impatience of constraint, severity, a certain austere passion, an inclination of imagination to the sublime.

3.

These personal traits, though quite compatible with the portrait on which I am commenting, are not visible in it. Nor are others, which belong especially, but not exclusively, to the younger Wordsworth. He had a spirit so vehement and affections so violent (it is his sister's word) as to inspire alarm for him. If he had been acquainted with that excuse for impotent idleness and selfishness, 'the artistic temperament,' he might have made out a good claim to it. He was from the beginning self-willed, and for a long time he appeared aimless. He would not work at the studies of his university: he preferred to imagine a university in which he _would_ work. He had a passion for wandering which was restrained only by want of means, and which opened his heart to every pedlar or tramp whom he met. After leaving Cambridge he would not fix on a profession. He remained, to the displeasure of his relatives, an idler in the land or out of it; and as soon as he had L900 of capital left to him he determined _not_ to have a profession. Sometimes he worked hard at his poetry, even heroically hard; but he did not work methodically, and often he wrote nothing for weeks, but loafed and walked and enjoyed himself. He was not blind like Milton, but the act of writing was physically disagreeable to him, and he made his woman-kind write to his dictation. He would not conform to rules, or attend to the dinner-bell, or go to church (he made up for this neglect later). 'He wrote his _Ode to Duty_,' said one of his friends, 'and then he had done with that matter.' He never 'tired' of his 'unchartered freedom.' In age, if he wanted to go out, whatever the hour and whatever the weather, he must have his way. 'In vain one reminded him that a letter needed an answer or that the storm would soon be over. It was very necessary for him to do what he liked.' If the poetic fit was on him he could attend to nothing else. He was passionately fond of his children, but, when the serious illness of one of them coincided with an onset of inspiration, it was impossible to rouse him to a sense of danger. At such times he was as completely possessed as any wild poet who ruins the happiness of everyone dependent on him. But he has himself described the tyranny of inspiration, and the reaction after it, in his _Stanzas written in Thomson's Castle of Indolence_. It is almost beyond doubt, I think, that the first portrait there is that of himself; and though it is idealised it is probably quite as accurate as the portrait in _A Poet's Epitaph_. In the _Prelude_ he tells us that, though he rarely at Cambridge betrayed by gestures or looks his feelings about nature, yet, when he did so, some of his companions said he was mad. Hazlitt, describing his manner of reading his own poetry in much later years, says, 'It is clear that he is either mad or inspired.'

Wordsworth's lawlessness was of the innocuous kind, but it is a superstition to suppose that he was a disgustingly well-regulated person. It is scarcely less unjust to describe his poetic sympathies as narrow and his poetic morality as puritanical. The former, of course, had nothing like the range of minds like Chaucer, or Shakespeare, or Browning, or the great novelists. Wordsworth's want of humour would by itself have made that impossible; and, in addition, though by no means wanting in psychological curiosity, he was not much interested in complex natures. Simple souls, and especially simple souls that are also deep, were the natures that attracted him: and in the same way the passions he loved to depict are not those that storm themselves out or rush to a catastrophe, but those that hold the soul in a vice for long years. But, these limitations admitted, it will not be found by anyone who reviews the characters in the smaller poems and the _Excursion_ (especially Book vii.), that Wordsworth's poetic sympathies are narrow. They are wider than those of any imaginative writer of his time and country except Scott and perhaps Crabbe.

Nor is his morality narrow. It is serious, but it is human and kindly and not in the least ascetic. 'It is the privilege of poetic genius,' he says in his defence of Burns, 'to catch a spirit of pleasure wherever it can be found--in the walks of nature and in the business of men. The poet, trusting to primary instincts, luxuriates among the felicities of love and wine, and is enraptured while he describes the fairer aspects of war: nor does he shrink from the company of the passion of love though immoderate--from convivial pleasure though intemperate--nor from the presence of war though savage and recognised as the handmaid of desolation. Who but some impenetrable dunce or narrow-minded puritan in works of art ever read without delight the picture which Burns has drawn of the convivial exaltation of the rustic adventurer Tam o' Shanter?' There is no want of sympathy in Wordsworth's own picture of the 'convivial exaltation' of his Waggoner. It is true that he himself never describes a scene in which, to quote his astonishing phrase, 'conjugal fidelity archly bends to the service of general benevolence,' and that his treatment of sexual passion is always grave and, in a true sense, moral; but it is plain and manly and perfectly free from timidity or monkishness. It would really be easier to make out against Wordsworth a charge of excessive tolerance than a charge of excessive rigidity. A beggar is the sort of person he likes. It is all very well for him to say that he likes the Old Cumberland Beggar because, by making people give, he keeps love alive in their hearts. It may be so--he says so, and I always believe him. But that was not his only reason; and it is clear to me that, when he met the tall gipsy-beggar, he gave her money because she was beautiful and queenly, and that he delighted in her two lying boys because of their gaiety and joy in life. Neither has he the least objection to a thief. The grandfather and grandson who go pilfering together, two infants separated by ninety years, meet with nothing but smiles from him. The Farmer of Tilsbury Vale, after thirty years of careless hospitality, found himself ruined. He borrowed money, spent some of it in paying a few of his other debts, and absconded to London.

But this he did all in the _ease_ of his heart.

And for this reason, and because in London he keeps the ease of his heart and continues to love the country, Wordsworth dismisses him with a blessing. What he cannot bear is torpor. He passes a knot of gipsies in the morning; and, passing them again after his twelve hours of joyful rambling, he finds them just as they were, sunk in sloth; and he breaks out,

Oh, better wrong and strife,
Better vain deeds and evil than such life.

He changed this shocking exclamation later, but it represents his original feeling, and he might have trusted that only an 'impenetrable dunce or narrow-minded puritan' would misunderstand him.[13]

Wordsworth's morality is of one piece with his optimism and with his determination to seize and exhibit in everything the element of good. But this is a subject far too large for treatment here, and I can refer to it only in the most summary way. What Arnold precisely meant when he said that Wordsworth 'put by' the cloud of human destiny I am not sure. That Wordsworth saw this cloud and looked at it steadily is beyond all question. I am not building on such famous lines as

The still sad music of humanity,

or

the fierce confederate storm
Of Sorrow, barricadoed evermore
Within the walls of cities;

or

Amid the groves, under the shadowy hills,
The generations are prepared; the pangs,
The internal pangs, are ready; the dread strife
Of poor humanity's afflicted will
Struggling in vain with ruthless destiny;

for, although such quotations could be multiplied, isolated expressions, even when not dramatic,[14] would prove little. But I repeat the remark already made, that if we review the subjects of many of Wordsworth's famous poems on human life,--the subjects, for example, of _The Thorn_, _The Sailor's Mother_, _Ruth_, _The Brothers_, _Michael_, _The Affliction of Margaret_, _The White Doe of Rylstone_, the story of Margaret in _Excursion_, i., half the stories told in _Excursion_, vi. and vii.--we find ourselves in the presence of poverty, crime, insanity, ruined innocence, torturing hopes doomed to extinction, solitary anguish, even despair. Ignore the manner in which Wordsworth treated his subjects, and you will have to say that his world, so far as humanity is concerned, is a dark world,--at least as dark as that of Byron. Unquestionably then he saw the cloud of human destiny, and he did not avert his eyes from it. Nor did he pretend to understand its darkness. The world was to him in the end 'this unintelligible world,' and the only 'adequate support for the calamities of mortal life' was faith.[15] But he was profoundly impressed, through the experience of his own years of crisis, alike by the dangers of despondency, and by the superficiality of the views which it engenders. It was for him (and here, as in other points, he shows his natural affinity to Spinoza) a condition in which the soul, concentrated on its own suffering, for that very reason loses hold both of its own being and of the reality of which it forms a part. His experience also made it impossible for him to doubt that what he grasped

At times when most existence with herself
Is satisfied,

--and these are the times when existence is most united in love with other existence--was, in a special sense or degree, the truth, and therefore that the evils which we suffer, deplore, or condemn, cannot really be what they seem to us when we merely suffer, deplore, or condemn them. He set himself to _see_ this, as far as he could, and to show it. He sang of pleasure, joy, glee, blitheness, love, wherever in nature or humanity they assert their indisputable power; and turning to pain and wrong, and gazing at them steadfastly, and setting himself to present the facts with a quiet but unsparing truthfulness, he yet endeavoured to show what he had seen, that sometimes pain and wrong are the conditions of a happiness and good which without them could not have been, that no limit can be set to the power of the soul to transmute them into its own substance, and that, in suffering and even in misery, there may still be such a strength as fills us with awe or with glory. He did not pretend, I repeat, that what he saw sufficed to solve the riddle of the painful earth. 'Our being rests' on 'dark foundations,' and 'our haughty life is crowned with darkness.' But still what he showed was what he _saw_, and he saw it in the cloud of human destiny. We are not here concerned with his faith in the sun behind that cloud; my purpose is only to insist that he 'fronted' it 'fearlessly.'

4.

After quoting the lines from _A Poet's Epitaph_, and Arnold's lines on Wordsworth, I asked how the man described in them ever came to write the _Ode_ on Immortality, or _Yew-trees_, or why he should say,

For I must tread on shadowy ground, must sink
Deep--and, aloft ascending, breathe in worlds
To which the heaven of heavens is but a veil.

The aspect of Wordsworth's poetry which answers this question forms my last subject.

We may recall this aspect in more than one way. First, not a little of Wordsworth's poetry either approaches or actually enters the province of the sublime. His strongest natural inclination tended there. He himself speaks of his temperament as 'stern,' and tells us that

to the very going out of youth
[He] too exclusively esteemed _that_ love,
And sought _that_ beauty, which, as Milton says,
Hath terror in it.

This disposition is easily traced in the imaginative impressions of his childhood as he describes them in the _Prelude_. His fixed habit of looking

with feelings of fraternal love
Upon the unassuming things that hold
A silent station in this beauteous world,

was only formed, it would seem, under his sister's influence, after his recovery from the crisis that followed the ruin of his towering hopes in the French Revolution. It was a part of his endeavour to find something of the distant ideal in life's familiar face. And though this attitude of sympathy and humility did become habitual, the first bent towards grandeur, austerity, sublimity, retained its force. It is evident in the political poems, and in all those pictures of life which depict the unconquerable power of affection, passion, resolution, patience, or faith. It inspires much of his greatest poetry of Nature. It emerges occasionally with a strange and thrilling effect in the serene, gracious, but sometimes stagnant atmosphere of the later poems,--for the last time, perhaps, in that magnificent stanza of the _Extempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg_ (1835),

Like clouds that rake the mountain-summits,
Or waves that own no curbing hand,
How fast has brother followed brother
From sunshine to the sunless land!

Wordsworth is indisputably the most sublime of our poets since Milton.

We may put the matter, secondly, thus. However much Wordsworth was the poet of small and humble things, and the poet who saw his ideal realised, not in Utopia, but here and now before his eyes, he was, quite as much, what some would call a mystic. He saw everything in the light of 'the visionary power.' He was, for himself,

The transitory being that beheld
This Vision.

He apprehended all things, natural or human, as the expression of something which, while manifested in them, immeasurably transcends them. And nothing can be more intensely Wordsworthian than the poems and passages most marked by this visionary power and most directly issuing from this apprehension. The bearing of these statements on Wordsworth's inclination to sublimity will be obvious at a glance.

Now we may prefer the Wordsworth of the daffodils to the Wordsworth of the yew-trees, and we may even believe the poet's mysticism to be moonshine; but it is certain that to neglect or throw into the shade this aspect of his poetry is neither to take Wordsworth as he really was nor to judge his poetry truly, since this aspect appears in much of it that we cannot deny to be first-rate. Yet there is, I think, and has been for some time, a tendency to this mistake. It is exemplified in Arnold's Introduction and has been increased by it, and it is visible in some degree even in Pater's essay. Arnold wished to make Wordsworth more popular; and so he was tempted to represent Wordsworth's poetry as much more simple and unambitious than it really was, and as much more easily apprehended than it ever can be. He was also annoyed by attempts to formulate a systematic Wordsworthian philosophy; partly, doubtless, because he knew that, however great the philosophical value of a poet's ideas may be, it cannot by itself determine the value of his poetry; but partly also because, having himself but little turn for philosophy, he was disposed to regard it as illusory; and further because, even in the poetic sphere, he was somewhat deficient in that kind of imagination which is allied to metaphysical thought. This is one reason of his curious failure to appreciate Shelley, and of the evident irritation which Shelley produced in him. And it is also one reason why, both in his _Memorial Verses_ and in the introduction to his selection from Wordsworth, he either ignores or depreciates that aspect of the poetry with which we are just now concerned. It is not true, we must bluntly say, that the cause of the greatness of this poetry 'is simple and may be told quite simply.' It is true, and it is admirably said, that this poetry 'is great because of the extraordinary power with which Wordsworth feels the joy offered to us in nature, the joy offered to us in the simple primary affections and duties.' But this is only half the truth.

Pater's essay is not thus one-sided. It is, to my mind, an extremely fine piece of criticism. Yet the tendency to which I am objecting does appear in it. Pater says, for example, that Wordsworth is the poet of nature, 'and of nature, after all, in her modesty. The English Lake country has, of course, its grandeurs. But the peculiar function of Wordsworth's genius, as carrying in it a power to open out the soul of apparently little and familiar things, would have found its true test had he become the poet of Surrey, say! and the prophet of its life.' This last sentence is, in one sense, doubtless true. The 'function' referred to could have been exercised in Surrey, and was exercised in Dorset and Somerset, as well as in the Lake country. And this function was a 'peculiar function of Wordsworth's genius.' But that it was _the_ peculiar function of his genius, or more peculiar than that other function which forms our present subject, I venture to deny; and for the full exercise of this latter function, it is hardly hazardous to assert, Wordsworth's childhood in a mountain district, and his subsequent residence there, were indispensable. This will be doubted for a moment, I believe, only by those readers (and they are not a few) who ignore the _Prelude_ and the _Excursion_. But the _Prelude_ and the _Excursion_, though there are dull pages in both, contain much of Wordsworth's best and most characteristic poetry. And even in a selection like Arnold's, which, perhaps wisely, makes hardly any use of them, many famous poems will be found which deal with nature but not with nature 'in her modesty.'

My main object was to insist that the 'mystic,' 'visionary,' 'sublime,' aspect of Wordsworth's poetry must not be slighted. I wish to add a few remarks on it, but to consider it fully would carry us far beyond our bounds; and, even if I attempted the task, I should not formulate its results in a body of doctrines. Such a formulation is useful, and I see no objection to it in principle, as one method of exploring Wordsworth's mind with a view to the better apprehension of his poetry. But the method has its dangers, and it is another matter to put forward the results as philosophically adequate, or to take the position that 'Wordsworth was first and foremost a philosophical thinker, a man whose intention and purpose it was to think out for himself, faithfully and seriously, the questions concerning man and nature and human life' (Dean Church). If this were true, he should have given himself to philosophy and not to poetry; and there is no reason to think that he would have been eminently successful. Nobody ever was so who was not forced by a special natural power and an imperious impulsion into the business of 'thinking out,' and who did not develope this power by years of arduous discipline. Wordsworth does not show it in any marked degree; and, though he reflected deeply and acutely, he was without philosophical training. His poetry is immensely interesting as an imaginative expression of the same mind which, in his day, produced in Germany great philosophies. His poetic experience, his intuitions, his single thoughts, even his large views, correspond in a striking way, sometimes in a startling way, with ideas methodically developed by Kant, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer. They remain admirable material for philosophy; and a philosophy which found itself driven to treat them as moonshine would probably be a very poor affair. But they are like the experience and the utterances of men of religious genius: great truths are enshrined in them, but generally the shrine would have to be broken to liberate these truths in a form which would satisfy the desire to understand. To claim for them the power to satisfy that desire is an error, and it tempts those in whom that desire is predominant to treat them as mere beautiful illusions.

Setting aside, then, any questions as to the ultimate import of the 'mystic' strain in Wordsworth's poetry, I intend only to call attention to certain traits in the kind of poetic experience which exhibits it most plainly. And we may observe at once that in this there is always traceable a certain hostility to 'sense.' I do not mean that hostility which is present in _all_ poetic experience, and of which Wordsworth was very distinctly aware. The regular action of the senses on their customary material produces, in his view, a 'tyranny' over the soul. It helps to construct that every-day picture of the world, of sensible objects and events 'in disconnection dead and spiritless,' which we take for reality. In relation to this reality we become passive slaves;[16] it lies on us with a weight 'heavy as frost and deep almost as life.' It is the origin alike of our torpor and our superficiality. _All_ poetic experience frees us from it to some extent, or breaks into it, and so may be called hostile to sense. But this experience is, broadly speaking, of two different kinds. The perception of the daffodils as dancing in glee, and in sympathy with other gleeful beings, shows us a living, joyous, loving world, and so a 'spiritual' world, not a merely 'sensible' one. But the hostility to sense is here no more than a hostility to _mere_ sense: this 'spiritual' world is itself the sensible world more fully apprehended: the daffodils do not change or lose their colour in disclosing their glee. On the other hand, in the kind of experience which forms our present subject, there is always some feeling of definite contrast with the limited sensible world. The arresting feature or object is felt in some way _against_ this background, or even as in some way a denial of it. Sometimes it is a visionary unearthly light resting on a scene or on some strange figure. Sometimes it is the feeling that the scene or figure belongs to the world of dream. Sometimes it is an intimation of boundlessness, contradicting or abolishing the fixed limits of our habitual view. Sometimes it is the obscure sense of 'unknown modes of being,' unlike the familiar modes. This kind of experience, further, comes often with a distinct shock, which may bewilder, confuse or trouble the mind. And, lastly, it is especially, though not invariably, associated with mountains, and again with solitude. Some of these bald statements I will go on to illustrate, only remarking that the boundary between these modes of imagination is, naturally, less marked and more wavering in Wordsworth's poetry than in my brief analysis.

We may begin with a poem standing near this boundary, the famous verses _To the Cuckoo_, 'O blithe new-comer.' It stands near the boundary because, like the poem on the Daffodils, it is entirely happy. But it stands unmistakably on the further side of the boundary, and is, in truth, more nearly allied to the _Ode_ on Immortality than to the poem on the Daffodils. The sense of sight is baffled, and its tyranny broken. Only a cry is heard, which makes the listener look a thousand ways, so shifting is the direction from which it reaches him. It seems to come from a mere 'voice,' 'an invisible thing,' 'a mystery.' It brings him 'a tale of visionary hours,'--hours of childhood, when he sought this invisible thing in vain, and the earth appeared to his bewildered but liberated fancy 'an unsubstantial fairy place.' And still, when he hears it, the great globe itself, we may say, fades like an unsubstantial pageant; or, to quote from the Immortality _Ode_, the 'shades of the prison house' melt into air. These words are much more solemn than the Cuckoo poem; but the experience is of the same type, and 'the visionary gleam' of the ode, like the 'wandering voice' of the poem, is the expression through sense of something beyond sense.

Take another passage referring to childhood. It is from the _Prelude_, ii. Here there is something more than perplexity. There is apprehension, and we are approaching the sublime:

One summer evening (led by her[17]) I found
A little boat tied to a willow tree
Within a rocky cave, its usual home.
Straight I unloosed her chain, and stepping in
Pushed from the shore. It was an act of stealth
And troubled pleasure, nor without the voice
Of mountain-echoes did my boat move on;
Leaving behind her still, on either side,
Small circles glittering idly in the moon,
Until they melted all into one track
Of sparkling light. But now, like one who rows,
Proud of his skill, to reach a chosen point
With an unswerving line, I fixed my view
Upon the summit of a craggy ridge,
The horizon's utmost boundary; far above
Was nothing but the stars and the grey sky.
She was an elfin pinnace; lustily
I dipped my oars into the silent lake,
And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boat
Went heaving through the water like a swan;
When, from behind that craggy steep till then
The horizon's bound, a huge peak, black and huge,
As if with voluntary power instinct,
Upreared its head. I struck and struck again,
And growing still in stature the grim shape
Towered up between me and the stars, and still,
For so it seemed, with purpose of its own
And measured motion like a living thing,
Strode after me. With trembling oars I turned,
And through the silent water stole my way
Back to the covert of the willow tree;
There in her mooring-place I left my bark,--
And through the meadows homeward went, in grave
And serious mood; but after I had seen
That spectacle, for many days, my brain
Worked with a dim and undetermined sense
Of unknown modes of being; o'er my thoughts
There hung a darkness, call it solitude
Or blank desertion. No familiar shapes
Remained, no pleasant images of trees,
Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields;
But huge and mighty forms, that do not live
Like living men, moved slowly through the mind
By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.

The best commentary on a poem is generally to be found in the poet's other works. And those last dozen lines furnish the best commentary on that famous passage in the _Ode_, where the poet, looking back to his childhood, gives thanks for it,--not however for its careless delight and liberty,

But for those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realised,
High instincts before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised.

Whether, or how, these experiences afford 'intimations of immortality' is not in question here; but it will never do to dismiss them so airily as Arnold did. Without them Wordsworth is not Wordsworth.

The most striking recollections of his childhood have not in all cases this manifest affinity to the _Ode_, but wherever the visionary feeling appears in them (and it appears in many), this affinity is still traceable. There is, for instance, in _Prelude_, xii., the description of the crag, from which, on a wild dark day, the boy watched eagerly the two highways below for the ponies that were coming to take him home for the holidays. It is too long to quote, but every reader of it will remember

the wind and sleety rain,
And all the business of the elements,
The single sheep, and the one blasted tree,
And the bleak music from that old stone wall,
The noise of wood and water, and the mist
That on the line of each of those two roads
Advanced in such indisputable shapes.

Everything here is natural, but everything is apocalyptic. And we happen to know why. Wordsworth is describing the scene in the light of memory. In that eagerly expected holiday his father died; and the scene, as he recalled it, was charged with the sense of contrast between the narrow world of common pleasures and blind and easy hopes, and the vast unseen world which encloses it in beneficent yet dark and inexorable arms. The visionary feeling has here a peculiar tone; but always, openly or covertly, it is the intimation of something illimitable, over-arching or breaking into the customary 'reality.' Its character varies; and so sometimes at its touch the soul, suddenly conscious of its own infinity, melts in rapture into that infinite being; while at other times the 'mortal nature' stands dumb, incapable of thought, or shrinking from some presence

Not un-informed with Phantasy, and looks
That threaten the profane.

This feeling is so essential to many of Wordsworth's most characteristic poems that it may almost be called their soul; and failure to understand them frequently arises from obtuseness to it. It appears in a mild and tender form, but quite openly, in the lines _To a Highland Girl_, where the child, and the rocks and trees and lake and road by her home, seem to the poet

Like something fashioned in a dream.

It gives to _The Solitary Reaper_ its note of remoteness and wonder; and even the slight shock of bewilderment due to it is felt in the opening line of the most famous stanza:

Will no one tell me what she sings?

Its etherial music accompanies every vision of the White Doe, and sounds faintly to us from far away through all the tale of failure and anguish. Without it such shorter narratives as _Hartleap Well_ and _Resolution and Independence_ would lose the imaginative atmosphere which adds mystery and grandeur to the apparently simple 'moral.'

In _Hartleap Well_ it is conveyed at first by slight touches of contrast. Sir Walter, in his long pursuit of the Hart, has mounted his third horse.

Joy sparkled in the prancing courser's eyes;
The horse and horseman are a happy pair;
But, though Sir Walter like a falcon flies,
There is a doleful silence in the air.

A rout this morning left Sir Walter's hall,
That as they galloped made the echoes roar;
But horse and man are vanished, one and all;
Such race, I think, was never seen before.

At last even the dogs are left behind, stretched one by one among the mountain fern.

Where is the throng, the tumult of the race?
The bugles that so joyfully were blown?
--This chase it looks not like an earthly chase;
Sir Walter and the Hart are left alone.

Thus the poem begins. At the end we have the old shepherd's description of the utter desolation of the spot where the waters of the little spring had trembled with the last deep groan of the dying stag, and where the Knight, to commemorate his exploit, had built a basin for the spring, three pillars to mark the last three leaps of his victim, and a pleasure-house, surrounded by trees and trailing plants, for the summer joy of himself and his paramour. But now 'the pleasure-house is dust,' and the trees are grey, 'with neither arms nor head':

Now, here is neither grass nor pleasant shade;
The sun on drearier hollow never shone;
So will it be, as I have often said,
Till trees, and stones, and fountain all are gone.

It is only this feeling of the presence of mysterious inviolable Powers, behind the momentary powers of hard pleasure and empty pride, that justifies the solemnity of the stanza:

The Being, that is in the clouds and air,
That is in the green leaves among the groves,
Maintains a deep and reverential care
For the unoffending creatures whom he loves.

_Hartleap Well_ is a beautiful poem, but whether it is entirely successful is, perhaps, doubtful. There can be no sort of doubt as to _Resolution and Independence_, probably, if we must choose, the most Wordsworthian of Wordsworth's poems, and the best test of ability to understand him. The story, if given in a brief argument, would sound far from promising. We should expect for it, too, a ballad form somewhat like that of _Simon Lee_. When we read it, we find instead lines of extraordinary grandeur, but, mingled with them, lines more pedestrian than could be found in an impressive poem from any other hand,--for instance,

And, drawing to his side, to him did say,
'This morning gives us promise of a glorious day.'

or,

'How is it that you live, and what is it you do?'

We meet also with that perplexed persistence, and that helpless reiteration of a question (in this case one already clearly answered), which in other poems threatens to become ludicrous, and on which a writer with a keener sense of the ludicrous would hardly have ventured. Yet with all this, and by dint of all this, we read with bated breath, almost as if we were in the presence of that 'majestical' Spirit in _Hamlet_, come to 'admonish' from another world, though not this time by terror. And one source of this effect is the confusion, the almost hypnotic obliteration of the habitual reasoning mind, that falls on the poet as he gazes at the leech-gatherer, and hears, without understanding, his plain reply to the enquiry about himself and the prosaic 'occupation' he 'pursues':

The old man still stood talking by my side;
But now his voice to me was like a stream
Scarce heard; nor word from word could I divide;
And the whole body of the man did seem
Like one whom I had met with in a dream;
Or like a man from some far region sent,
To give me human strength, by apt admonishment.

The same question was asked again, and the answer was repeated. But

While he was talking thus, the lonely place,
The old man's shape, and speech, all troubled me.

'Trouble' is a word not seldom employed by the poet to denote the confusion caused by some visionary experience. Here are, again, the fallings from us, vanishings, blank misgivings, dim fore-feelings of the soul's infinity.

Out of many illustrations I will choose three more. There is in the _Prelude_, iv., the passage (so strongly resembling _Resolution and Independence_ that I merely refer to it) where Wordsworth describes an old soldier suddenly seen, leaning against a milestone on the moon-lit road, all alone:

No living thing appeared in earth or air;
And, save the flowing water's peaceful voice,
Sound there was none ...
... still his form
Kept the same awful steadiness--at his feet
His shadow lay, and moved not.

His shadow proves he was no ghost; but a ghost was never ghostlier than he. And by him we may place the London beggar of _Prelude_, vii.:

How oft, amid those overflowing streets,
Have I gone forward with the crowd, and said
Unto myself, 'The face of every one
That passes by me is a mystery!'
Thus have I looked, nor ceased to look, oppressed
By thoughts of what and whither, when and how,
Until the shapes before my eyes became
A second-sight procession, such as glides
Over still mountains, or appears in dreams;
And once, far-travelled in such mood, beyond
The reach of common indication, lost
Amid the moving pageant, I was smitten
Abruptly, with the view (a sight not rare)
Of a blind Beggar, who, with upright face,
Stood, propped against a wall, upon his chest
Wearing a written paper, to explain
His story, whence he came, and who he was.
Caught by the spectacle my mind turned round
As with the might of waters; an apt type
This label seemed of the utmost we can know,
Both of ourselves and of the universe;
And, on the shape of that unmoving man,
His steadfast face and sightless eyes, I gazed,
As if admonished from another world.

Still more curious psychologically is the passage, in the preceding book of the _Prelude_, which tells us of a similar shock and leads to the description of its effects. The more prosaically I introduce the passage, the better. Wordsworth and Jones ('Jones, as from Calais southward you and I') set out to walk over the Simplon, then traversed only by a rough mule-track. They wandered out of the way, and, meeting a peasant, discovered from his answers to their questions that, without knowing it, they '_had crossed the Alps_.' This may not sound important, and the italics are Wordsworth's, not mine. But the next words are these:

Imagination--here the Power so called
Through sad incompetence of human speech,
That awful Power rose from the mind's abyss
Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps,
At once, some lonely traveller. I was lost;
Halted without an effort to break through;
But to my conscious soul I now can say--
'I recognise thy glory': in such strength
Of usurpation, when the light of sense
Goes out, but with a flash that has revealed
The invisible world, doth greatness make abode,
There harbours; whether we be young or old,
Our destiny, our being's heart and home,
Is with infinitude, and only there;
With hope it is, hope that can never die,
Effort, and expectation, and desire,
And something evermore about to be.

And what was the result of this shock? The poet may answer for himself in some of the greatest lines in English poetry. The travellers proceeded on their way down the Defile of Gondo.

Downwards we hurried fast,
And, with the half-shaped road which we had missed,
Entered a narrow chasm. The brook and road
Were fellow-travellers in this gloomy strait,
And with them did we journey several hours
At a slow pace. The immeasurable height
Of woods decaying, never to be decayed,
The stationary blasts of waterfalls,
And in the narrow rent at every turn
Winds thwarting winds, bewildered and forlorn,
The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky,
The rocks that muttered close upon our ears,
Black drizzling crags that spake by the way-side
As if a voice were in them, the sick sight
And giddy prospect of the raving stream,
The unfettered clouds and region of the Heavens,
Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light--
Were all like workings of one mind, the features
Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree;
Characters of the great Apocalypse,
The types and symbols of Eternity,
Of first, and last, and midst, and without end.[18]

I hardly think that 'the poet of Surrey, say, and the prophet of its life' could have written thus. And of all the poems to which I have lately referred, and all the passages I have quoted, there are but two or three which do not cry aloud that their birth-place was the moor or the mountain, and that severed from their birth-place they would perish. The more sublime they are, or the nearer they approach sublimity, the more is this true. The cry of the cuckoo in _O blithe new-comer_, though visionary, is not sublime; but, echoed by the mountain, it is

Like--but oh, how different![19]

It was among the mountains that Wordsworth, as he says of his Wanderer, _felt_ his faith. It was there that all things

Breathed immortality, revolving life,
And greatness still revolving; infinite.
There littleness was not; the least of things
Seemed infinite; and there his spirit shaped
Her prospects, nor did he believe,--he _saw_.

And even if we count his vision a mere dream, still he put into words, as no other poet has, the spirit of the mountains.

Two voices are there; one is of the sea,
One of the mountains; each a mighty voice.

And of the second of these we may say that 'few or none hears it right' now he is gone.

Partly because he is the poet of mountains he is, even more pre-eminently, the poet of solitude. For there are tones in the mountain voice scarcely audible except in solitude, and the reader whom Wordsworth's greatest poetry baffles could have no better advice offered him than to do what he has probably never done in his life--to be on a mountain alone. But for Wordsworth not this solitude only, but all solitude and all things solitary had an extraordinary fascination.

The outward shows of sky and earth,
Of hill and valley, he has viewed;
And impulses _of deeper birth_
Have come to him in solitude.

The sense of solitude, it will readily be found, is essential to nearly all the poems and passages we have been considering, and to some of quite a different character, such as the Daffodil stanzas. And it is not merely that the poet is alone; what he sees is so too. If the leech-gatherer and the soldier on the moon-lit road had not been solitary figures, they would not have awaked 'the visionary power'; and it is scarcely fanciful to add that if the boy who was watching for his father's ponies had had beside him any more than

The _single_ sheep and the _one_ blasted tree,

the mist would not have advanced along the roads 'in such indisputable shapes.' With Wordsworth that power seems to have sprung into life at once on the perception of loneliness. What is lonely is a spirit. To call a thing lonely or solitary is, with him, to say that it opens a bright or solemn vista into infinity. He himself 'wanders lonely as a cloud': he seeks the 'souls of lonely places': he listens in awe to

One voice, the solitary raven ...
An iron knell, with echoes from afar:

against the distant sky he descries the shepherd,

A solitary object and sublime,
Above all height! like an aerial cross
Stationed alone upon a spiry rock
Of the Chartreuse, for worship.

But this theme might be pursued for hours, and I will refer only to two poems more. The editor of the _Golden Treasury_, a book never to be thought of without gratitude, changed the title _The Solitary_ _Reaper_ into _The Highland Reaper_. He may have had his reasons. Perhaps he had met some one who thought that the Reaper belonged to Surrey. Still the change was a mistake: the 'solitary' in Wordsworth's title gave the keynote. The other poem is _Lucy Gray_. 'When I was little,' a lover of Wordsworth once said, 'I could hardly bear to read _Lucy Gray_, it made me feel so lonely.' Wordsworth called it _Lucy Gray, or Solitude_, and this young reader understood him. But there is too much, reason to fear that for half his readers his 'solitary child' is generalised into a mere 'little girl,' and that they never receive the main impression he wished to produce. Yet his intention is announced in the opening lines, and as clearly shown in the lovely final stanzas, which give even to this ballad the visionary touch which distinguishes it from _Alice Fell_:

Yet some maintain that to this day
She is a living child;
That you may see sweet Lucy Gray
Upon the lonesome wild.

O'er rough and smooth she trips along,
And never looks behind;
And sings a solitary song
That whistles in the wind.

The solitariness which exerted so potent a spell on Wordsworth had in it nothing 'Byronic.' He preached in the _Excursion_ against the solitude of 'self-indulging spleen.' He was even aware that he himself, though free from that weakness, had felt

perhaps too much
The self-sufficing power of Solitude.[20]

No poet is more emphatically the poet of community. A great part of his verse--a part as characteristic and as precious as the part on which I have been dwelling--is dedicated to the affections of home and neighbourhood and country, and to that soul of joy and love which links together all Nature's children, and 'steals from earth to man, from man to earth.' And this soul is for him as truly the presence of 'the Being that is in the clouds and air' and in the mind of man as are the power, the darkness, the silence, the strange gleams and mysterious visitations which startle and confuse with intimations of infinity. But solitude and solitariness were to him, in the main, one of these intimations. They had not for him merely the 'eeriness' which they have at times for everyone, though that was essential to some of the poems we have reviewed. They were the symbol of power to stand alone, to be 'self-sufficing,' to dispense with custom and surroundings and aid and sympathy--a self-dependence at once the image and the communication of 'the soul of all the worlds.' Even when they were full of 'sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not,' the solitude of the Reaper or of Lucy, they so appealed to him. But they appealed also to that austerer strain which led him to love 'bare trees and mountains bare,' and lonely places, and the bleak music of the old stone wall, and to dwell with awe, and yet with exultation, on the majesty of that 'unconquerable mind' which through long years holds its solitary purpose, sustains its solitary passion, feeds upon its solitary anguish. For this mind, as for the blind beggar or the leech-gatherer, the 'light of sense' and the sweetness of life have faded or 'gone out'; but in it 'greatness makes abode,' and it 'retains its station proud,' 'by form or image unprofaned.' Thus, in whatever guise it might present itself, solitariness 'carried far into his heart' the haunting sense of an 'invisible world'; of some Life beyond this 'transitory being' and 'unapproachable by death';

Of Life continuous, Being unimpaired;
That hath been, is, and where it was and is
There shall endure,--existence unexposed
To the blind walk of mortal accident;
From diminution safe and weakening age;
While man grows old, and dwindles, and decays;
And countless generations of mankind
Depart; and leave no vestige where they trod.

For me, I confess, all this is far from being 'mere poetry'--partly because I do not believe that any such thing as 'mere poetry' exists. But whatever kind or degree of truth we may find in all this, everything in Wordsworth that is sublime or approaches sublimity has, directly or more remotely, to do with it. And without this part of his poetry Wordsworth would be 'shorn of his strength,' and would no longer stand, as he does stand, nearer than any other poet of the Nineteenth Century to Milton.

NOTE.

I take this opportunity of airing a heresy about _We are Seven_. Wordsworth's friend, James Tobin, who saw the _Lyrical Ballads_ while they were going through the press, told him that this poem would make him everlastingly ridiculous, and entreated him in vain to cancel it. I have forgotten how it was received in 1798, but it has long been one of the most popular of the ballad poems, and I do not think I have ever heard it ridiculed. I wonder, however, what its readers take to be the 'moral' of it, for I have never been able to convince myself that the 'moral' given in the poem itself truly represents the imaginative impression from which the poem arose.

The 'moral' is in this instance put at the beginning, in the mutilated opening stanza:

--------A simple child,
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,
What should it know of death?

Wordsworth, in composing, began his poem with the end; and when it was all but finished he recited it to Dorothy and Coleridge, and observed that a prefatory stanza was wanted, and that he should enjoy his tea better if he could add it first. Coleridge at once threw off the stanza as we have it, except that the first line ran, 'A simple child, dear brother Jim,'--this Jim, who rhymes with 'limb,' being the James Tobin who protested afterwards against the poem. The stanza was printed in the _Lyrical Ballads_ as Coleridge made it, Wordsworth objecting to the words 'dear brother Jim' as ludicrous, but (apparently) giving way for the sake of the joke of introducing Tobin.