Pagina-afbeeldingen
PDF
ePub
[ocr errors]

uman weakness, however, there is a long to the Revolution, Wordsworth beense in which we may truly say that longs to the reconstruction. That stormy Wordsworth was faithful to the end to discontent with self and the world, which he principles of his youth; or that the utters itself in every poem of Byron, hange through which he passed was only contains little that had not been expressed be change of a true development, the with greater force by Rousseau, unless hange of the acorn into the oak. What it be that Rousseau speaks the voice of ade him in his youth so strong a parti- hope, and Byron that of disappointment, n of the Revolution was his faith in if not of despair. The somewhat shrill, an, and his indifference to all the exter- but pure and penetrating, melody of al differences of rank and circumstance; Shelley's song seems to be far removed nd he was a believer to the last in this from the sentimentalism of Rousseau; primitive gospel of liberty, equality, and but the essential purport of it, after all, raternity. The apparent failure of the is the deification of pure impulse. What [rench Revolution, the gathering tragedy is there in the "Prometheus Unbound," the Reign of Terror, came to him, "The Revolt of Islam," and many other deed, not merely as a painful shock of of Shelley's poems but the half-angelic, arprise and disappointment, but as a half-childish reiteration of the doctrine eadly blow at his faith in good and his that all evil is caused by tyrants," opes for humanity. The way in which and that the one cure for all the ills uch a blow is met is a fair gauge of that flesh is heir to is to get rid of the oral strength. To the majority of the policeman? On the other hand, Wordsnthusiasts of the time the disappoint- worth's poetry is in its essence original ents of France brought nothing but the and creative; it carries us into a new ineeling that they had been the victims of tellectual region in which the ideas of the illusion; nothing but a lesson of scep- Revolution have not perished, but have, ical moderation and a loss of faith in as it were, risen again in a better form. piritual forces. There were others Of course, this does not at once settle the and their successors still remain - who comparative value of Wordsworth's poetic vere unable either to give up their pas- achievements; for the content of poetry ionate hope for humanity or to change its is nothing without the form. But, on the orm, and who persisted in repeating with other hand, it may be equally said that ncreased vehemence the creed which des- the form is little without the content; and ny had weighed in the balance and found in the gift of creative insight, which makes anting. But in minds really creative him the poet of the future rather than of nd original, the disappointment gave the past, Wordsworth stands beyond ccasion neither to despair nor to vio- every poet of his day, except Goethe. ence, but became a critical turning-point | And if he is without Goethe's wide culture of thought, leading them to ask how the belief in man which they could not surender, was to be reconciled with the failre of their immediate expectations. For such minds, the ideas of "nature" nd "liberty"—the ideas of the Revoluon-did not become unmeaning, but eceived a new interpretation, in which hey were purified, as by fire, from the pase alloy with which they had been minled. An idea, like a seed, "cannot be quickened unless it die." and only those, who could keep the faith of the Revolution nquenched through its seeming failure, ere capable of finding out the truth hich underlay that faith and gave it its

and sympathy with all the. elements of social and intellectual progress, he is, as unmistakably as Goethe himself, the representative of new spiritual forces of thoughts and feelings which had never found poetic expression until Wordsworth expressed them.

That this is true, and that Wordsworth is a poet with whom the principles of the Revolution acquire a new and higher meaning, may be seen more clearly by a comparison of the leading ideas of his poetry with those of Rousseau. Rousseau, like Wordsworth, was the prophet of nature, as opposed to everything that is arbitrary and conventional. And this general contrast had with him three differNow, among the men of genius who ent though closely related meanings. In sought thus to re-interpret the ideas of the first place, Rousseau called attention he time, the name of Wordsworth de- to certain harmonies between the outward serves a high place. If we contrast him world and the soul of man, which till his with some of the greatest poetic voices time had passed almost unobserved. He of his generation, with Shelley or Byron, found outward nature to be most human e see that while they on the whole be-in its meaning, just where it had been

Dover.

spiritual feeling, and a finer poetic sight, has done much to discover essential truth of the gospel of na and freedom, and to separate it from baser elements, with which in Rouss it was mingled.

I. The love of the wilder and gra aspects of natural beauty, of moun and woodland untouched by the han man, is the first element of Wordswor poetry. No one has expressed more f the power of wild nature to elevate refresh the soul of man, to stir wi him new sympathies, which are de seated, and, perhaps, for that very rea were long hidden from the ordinary sciousness. His first gift as a poet, natural basis of his genius, was an int organic sensibility to the immediate b ties of sight or sound, which sho itself even in his earliest years. "Y he says,

hitherto regarded as most inhuman. Not | Wordsworth's most powerful and cha the garden or the meadow, but the teristic utterances grew out of one "sounding cataract, the tall rock, the other of these three lessons of Rouss mountain, and the deep and gloomy - though, at the same time, not on wood," were his chosen haunts. He them is simply echoed, but all are tr reconciled man to the world, and taught formed in the light of a purer, if n him to find rest and refreshment for the greater, genius. Wordsworth is R weary spirit in the wild freedom of na- seau moralized, Christianized, and, a ture, and in presence of those awful man- were, transfigured by the light of ifestations of her power which had hith-agination. The one-sidedness of erto been considered most alien and revolutionary ideas may not be alw unfriendly to humanity. And in this way completely transcended; but a dec he opened up sources of emotional experience, springs of poetry and imaginative delight, which had scarcely been touched by any writer before his time. Again, in the second place, Rousseau meant by a return to nature, an assertion of the supreme importance of the primary bonds of human affection, and in connection therewith, of the dignity of the humblest forms of human labor, and especially of the pastoral and agricultural life. A simple rustic existence, in which the charities of the family are little disturbed by the ambitions and rivalries of civilization, seemed to him to be the ideal of what is healthful for man, morally and intellectually. Hence his denunciations of luxury, and his fanatical attack on the arts and sciences, as corrupting the simplicity of human life extravagances which received a color of excuse from the fact that they were addressed to a society in which the weapons of civilization had been often turned against the first principles of social morality. Lastly, Rousseau meant by a return to nature, a return by each man upon himself, an awakening in him of a consciousness of his capacities, his rights, and his duties. The individual man was to him, not merely a part in a great social whole, but a whole in himself a being not to be subjected to any external authority, to any authority except the raison commune which 66 lighteth every man that cometh into the world." In this sense the teaching of Rousseau was only a last development of the principle of the Reformation that no authority can claim man's belief or homage, except the God who speaks within him. Unfortunately the doctrine was formulated by Rousseau in such a way as to sever the individual from that general social life of humanity, through which all spiritual culture must come to him; and thus the vindication of freedom changed, in his hands, into a declamation against civilization, and an apotheosis of the "noble savage."

[ocr errors]

Now it may be shown that almost all

Yes, I remember when the changeful eart)
And twice five summers on my mind
stamped

The features of the moving year, even the
I held unconscious intercourse with beaut
Old as creation, drinking in a pure
Organic pleasure from the silver wreaths
Of curling mist, or from the level plain
Of waters, colored by impending clouds.

(Vol. v. 17

While in his boyhood, he had alr noticed "the infinite variety of nat appearances which had not been tioned by the poets, so far as I acquainted with them." This na sensibility of his was, as it were, crystallizing centre round which poetry grew; but it is seldom that in verse he is content simply to picture objects before him. His most com method is to make the immediate ob the starting-point of a meditative tho which hovers between the outward the inward, and uses each alternate interpret the other. His great them he tells us, is the "wedding" of the i lect of man "to this goodly univers love and holy passion." And some

[ocr errors]

Such rebounds the inward ear

Catches sometimes from afar :
Listen, ponder, hold them dear,

For of God, of God they are.

the slow, ruminative movement, with which he seeks out the correspondences and harmonies of nature and spirit, does not prove inconsistent with the sensuous fervor of poetry. The poems on "Mat- Again, if for Wordsworth there is no thew," or the "Ode to Lycoris," show absolute division between man and the how Wordsworth can make meditation material world; if for him "sun, moon, musical, without any heightening of its and stars all struggle in the toils of mortal natural tones. Perhaps, however, his sympathy," it was to be expected that his greatest successes, those in which he eye would be keen to detect the links of reaches the height of absolute vision, are unity, the correspondences, that connect to be found in certain passages in which, man more directly with all living creaby a single stroke, he breaks down the tures. The daisy and the celandine, the wall between outward and inward, so that broom and the thorn, are for him living " and "creating "finding seem to be friends and companions. To him "the only different aspects of the same thing. meanest flower that blows can give One familiar instance of those sudden thoughts that do often lie too deep for and certain intuitions by which Words- tears," though characteristically he speaks worth not seldom dissipates the veil of almost exclusively of the wild flowers, sense, and brings us into unity with na- and he has little to say about the culture, may be given, the passage about tured beauties of the garden. And the the boy on Windermere, who same spirit makes him keen to detect and express the secret bonds of sympathy that grow up between man and the animals that stand nearest to him, especially the dog and the horse. The mystic charm of "The White Doe of Rylstone lies in the way in which the doe, without transgressing the bounds of its natural human sorrow and human sympathy. In life, is yet lifted up into the sphere of "Peter Bell" Wordsworth even tries with partial success - to change the current of ordinary associations by making the ass the means of awaking the voice of humanity in the man.

Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls
That they might answer him; and they would

shout

Across the watery vale and shout again
Responsive to his call, with quivering peals
And long halloos, and screams and echoes

loud

Redoubled and redoubled; concourse wild

Of jocund din. And when there came a pause
Of silence, such as baffled his best skill,
Then sometimes in that silence, while he hung
Loitering, a gentle shock of mild surprise
Has carried far into his heart the voice
Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind,
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,
Its woods, and that uncertain heaven received
Into the bosom of the steady lake.

Such passages
and many more remark-
able might be quoted cannot be read
without a "gentle shock of mild surprise"
at the coincidence or correspondence of
inward and outward, as at the sudden ap-
pearance of a friend's face under a strange
disguise. By such electric strokes, even
more than by the direct expression of his
poetic creed, though that also is not want-
ing, Wordsworth makes us feel that it is
one spirit that speaks in man and nature,
and that, therefore, the poet's vision is no
mere playing with metaphors, but a real
discovery of "a presence far more deeply
interfused." The poet, with trembling
and watchful sensibility, seems to stand
e between the worlds, and catches the
faintest sounds of recognition that are
carried from the one to the other.

Hark! it is the mountain echo,
Solitary, clear, profound,
Answering to the shouting cuckoo,
Giving to her sound for sound.

[ocr errors]

2. This tendency of Wordsworth to "penetrate the lofty and the low," however, leads us to notice the second point of connection between his ideas and those of Rousseau. Rousseau's vindication of the dignity of the life of peasants, as containing in it the opportunity, and even the best opportunity, for the exercise of all the higher powers of human nature, found an instant sympathetic echo in the breast of the poet of the lakes. And there was something even in the one-sided hatred of "luxury," characteristic of Rousseau, which was not altogether repugnant to Wordsworth. Reared among a race of simple, though not untrained or ignorant, rustics of strong selfrespecting character, Wordsworth cared little for any but those primary spiritual interests of human life, which seemed to him to be as fully secured in his native hills as anywhere. The doctrine that the worth of man's life is not to be measured by differences of culture any more than by differences of rank or wealth, was to him an easily-learnt lesson. In

fact he tells us that in this respect the | believer in the Wordsworthian creed, an principles of the Revolution seemed to him almost axiomatic.

If at the first great outbreak I rejoiced
Less than might well befit my youth, the cause
In part lay here, that unto me the events
Seemed nothing out of nature's certain course-
A gift that was come rather late than soon,

who has tried to follow it in purging hi mind of all artificial associations, ma feel his faith falter at some of these pe formances. Yet we need not suppos that they were the result of any consciou determination in Wordsworth to write u to a particular theory. He tells us, in deed, in one of his prefaces, that "hun But in Wordsworth's mind the doctrine ble and rustic life was generally chosen was deprived of the baser ingredients of for the subject of his verse, "because i fanatical bitterness and envy, which so that condition the essential passions often tainted the assertion of the essen- the heart find a better soil in which the tial equality of men in Rousseau and his can attain their maturity, are less unde followers. Wordsworth had too genuine restraint, and speak a plainer and mor a belief in the superiority of a life of emphatic language; because in that con simple cares and pleasures to feel any dition of life our elementary feelings e such bitterness; he was tempted rather ist in a state of greater simplicity, an to pity than to envy those who diverged consequently may be more accuratel from his ideal of "plain living and high contemplated and more forcibly comm thinking." The levelling spirit of the nicated; because the manners of rur Revolution, therefore, appears in him in a life germinate from those elementar purified form, as a belief that "God hath feelings, and from the necessary chara chosen the weak things of the world to ter of rural occupations are more easil confound the mighty." Yet, after all, the comprehended and more durable; and one-sidedness of the revolutionary spirit lastly, because in that condition the pa has not quite disappeared in Wordsworth: sions of men are incorporated with th it shows itself in the set bent of his mind beautiful and permanent forms of n to exalt that which the world has gener-ture." * But this theory came afterward ally despised or neglected. When he as the vindication of a practice, which ha declared in one of his earliest poems that flowed in the first instance from the na ural tendencies of his mind. We ma He who feels contempt for any living thing, Hath faculties which he hath never used, regret the exaggeration, the human to much," which, in cases like those abov he was expressing a thought which is mentioned, repels many from Word never far from his mind, and which fre- worth, or prevents them from duly est quently shows itself in his selection of mating his genius; but it must be clear t subjects. The world of polite literature every careful reader that it would be in was scandalized in his own day and it possible to separate this element from can scarcely be said to have ceased yet his poems without taking away at th to be scandalized by his choice of ped- same time that which gives them the lars and wagoners, peasants and beggars, characteristic power. A tone of sent for the heroes and protagonists of his ment which is half-democratic and hal verse; but to Wordsworth such a choice Christian, and which will not tolerate an was almost inevitable. As Mr. Morley monopolies of good, is present in all hi says that Rousseau would not have been greater poems, and indeed it breaks fro Rousseau "if he had felt it shameful or his lips almost unconsciously at ever derogatory to marry a kitchen wench; turn. For him, poetry, wisdom, heroism so we may fairly assert that Wordsworth are the common property of mankind: a would not have been Wordsworth, if he the deeper experiences of life are thos had not thought a leech-gatherer a better that belong to every one; and even "pleas hero than a king. His constant ten- ure is spread through the earth in stra dency to assert the sanctity, the essen-gifts, to be claimed by whoever sha tial nobility and poetic beauty of modes find." In his treatment of the questio of life, feelings, and interests, to which of education Wordsworth sometimes re superficial associations and sometimes minds us of Rousseau's attack upon a even associations that are not quite and science, so firmly is he convinced tha superficial of degradation and mean- the "substantial things". are within th ness are usually attached, is seen in reach of every one, and that all we ge poems like "Peter Bell," "The Idiot Boy," Goody Blake and Harry Gill," etc. Even one who is a most orthodox

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

Poems, vi. p. 308.

† Cf. Poems, iii. 75; v. 373-4; vi. 13.

66

by wider culture scarcely compensates
for that unsettling of the natural balance
of mind which culture often brings with
it. Even his æsthetic theory, to which
we have already referred, that the poetry
is only a selection of the "language of
real life," and is inferior to that lan-
guage at its best, springs from the same
root. He is so determined to correct the
error of those

Who, while they most ambitiously set forth
Extrinsic differences, the outward marks
Whereby society has parted man
From man, neglect the universal heart,

that he will scarcely admit the existence of
any differences which affect the spiritual
life at all, if it be not a difference in favor
of those who live the simplest life. Mr.
Hutton, in his criticism upon Wordsworth,
has spoken of his "spiritual frugality" in
making the most of every simple occasion,
and refraining from any waste of the
sources of emotion; but the secret of this
frugality is Wordsworth's belief that there
is little difference between small and
great occasions, and that, if we cannot
and the greatest meanings in the most
familiar experiences, we will find them

nowhere.

Long have I loved what I behold

The night that calms, the day that cheers;
The common growth of mother-earth
Suffices me- - her tears and mirth,
Her humblest mirth and tears.
These given, what more need I desire
To stir, to soothe, to elevate,
What nobler marvels than the mind
May in life's daily prospect find,
May find, or there create?

But his disappointment taught him to
Trust the elevation which had made him one
With the great family that still survives
To illuminate the abyss of ages past,
Sage, warrior, prophet, hero;
and to believe that there is

One great society alone on earth,

The noble living and the noble dead. And the effect of this belief in what Comte would have called the solidarity of man, was shown in Wordsworth's intense sympathy with the national struggles of Spain and Germany against Napoleon. Yet, on the whole, we have to admit that this idea did not carry him very far. He apprehended it, but it did not possess him as he was possessed by the ideas we have already mentioned. He is not the poet of the unity and the progress of humanity; perhaps the poet whom that idea shall inspire has yet to arise. What Wordsworth, like Rousseau, loves to speak of is rather the power and dignity of the individual man, and how he can attain to "freedom in himself" under all circumstances. "The Prelude," in which Wordsworth gives an account of his own spiritual development, is one of the numerous echoes of the "Confessions" of Rousseau; but it is an echo in which the morbid and unhealthy self-analysis of the "Confessions" has all but disappeared, and in which the interest of the reader is claimed on grounds which are all but independent of the mere individual. Wordsworth seeks to exhibit to us, not so much his own personal career, as the way in which, amid the difficulties of the time, a human soul might find peace and inward freedom. He rejects any claim to exceptional privilege, and takes his stand upon the rights of simple humanity.

There's not a man
That lives, who hath not known his godlike
hours,

And feels not what an empire we inherit,
As natural beings in the strength of nature!
He bids us find a confirmation of our
spiritual destiny even in the childish

3. The deepest source of this love of
simple things is that faith in man, in each
man, and all men, which was also the
animating principle of Rousseau. But
even Rousseau was not a pure individu-
alist, but based the greatness of the
individual on the fact that the raison
commune speaks within him, and that he
can be made into an organ of the volonté
générale. And Wordsworth, who had, as
was to be expected, a much deeper appre-appetite for wonder.
hension of this truth, tells us in "The
Prelude" that he found the explanation
of the immediate failure of the French
Revolution in the fact that the revolu-
tionists forgot the unity of humanity and
he continuity of its development. In the
first enthusiasm of his youthful republi-
canism, he had hoped to see

The man to come parted as by a gulf
From him who had been.
VOL. XXX,

LIVING AGE

1515

Our childhood sits,
Our simple childhood sits upon a throne,
That hath more power than all the elements.
And the highest effect of natural grandeur
of the glories of the Alps, for him, is that
it makes us conscious that

Our destiny, our being's heart and home,
Is with infinitude, and only there;
With hope it is, hope that can never die,

« VorigeDoorgaan »