VI

RURAL LIFE AND ITS POETRY

It is impossible thoroughly to understand Wordsworth's poetic strength and limitations without a glance at his life. We discover it to have been an unusually idyllic and comfortable one. Belonging to the well-to-do middle class (his father was an attorney), he studied at Cambridge and then travelled. In 1795, not long after his return from abroad, he received a legacy of £900 from an admirer of his genius, which, added to his share of a debt of £8500 due to his father by an English nobleman, and paid to the family about this time, placed him in a position to live without taking up any profession. In 1802 he married; in 1813 he settled at Rydal Mount in the Lake district. He held the appointment of Distributor of Stamps, which was practically a sinecure, from 1813 to 1842, when he resigned in favour of one of his sons. The salary of this appointment was £500. In 1843 he succeeded Southey as Poet Laureate, and as such enjoyed a pension of £300 a year till his death, which occurred in 1850, when he had just completed his eightieth year. Sheltered on every side from the outward vicissitudes of life, he regarded them from a Protestant-philosophical point of view.

A career such as this was not calculated to stir the passions; nor is passion discoverable either in Wordsworth's life or his poetry. In the lives of most eminent authors we find some preponderant circumstance, one or more turningpoints, one or other ostensible source of melancholy, or of strength of character, or of productivity; in Wordsworth's nothing of the kind is to be found. No congenital misfortune crippled him, no implacably violent animosity goaded him and set its mark on his spirit. The critics did

not spare him with mockery and contempt, and they continued their attacks for a long time. From 1800 to 1820 his poetry was trodden under foot; from 1820 to 1830 it struggled; after 1830 it received universal recognition. But the animosity was not stupid and violent enough, the struggle was not hot enough, the victory not brilliant enough, to give colour and lustre to his career, or to make it a subject of song. His inmost, personal life was never so intense that it could absorb his poetry or provide it with subjects. On the contrary, it led him to look outwards. The wars on the Continent, the natural surroundings of his home, and the little, insignificant set of human beings amongst whom he lived, engrossed his thoughts. He was not, like Byron, too much absorbed in his own affairs to have tranquillity of mind to dwell upon the small things and the small people whom he exhibits and describes with tender sympathy.

He undoubtedly felt himself the centre of his world. From his retired, idyllic home there issued from time to time collections of short poems or single long ones, provided with explanatory prefaces which, piling example on example, demonstrated to the reader that all great poets have been misunderstood or despised by their contemporaries; that every author, in so far as he is great and at the same time original, is obliged to create the taste by means of which his works can be enjoyed. His predecesors have, no doubt, smoothed the way for all that he has in common with them; but for what is peculiarly his own he is in the condition of Hannibal among the Alps. (Preface of 1815.)

Wordsworth was well aware that no intellectual pioneer can expect complete recognition from any but his younger contemporaries. But the criticism meted out to him, which was not aggressive enough to rouse in him a recklessly bellicose spirit like Byron's, made him self-absorbed and arrogant. The one variety in his daily life was provided by occasional visits from admirers who were making a tour in the neighbourhood and had letters of introduction to him. These strangers he received surrounded by his admiring family; he conversed with them in a cold and dignified

manner, and not unfrequently repelled them by the egotism with which he quoted and praised his own works, the indifference he manifested to everything else, the rigour with which he insisted on every outward sign of respect being shown him, and the solemnity with which he repeated even the most insignificant things that had been said in his praise.

A number of anecdotes illustrating his egotism have been preserved. Thomas Moore (Memoirs, iii. 163) tells how one day, in a large party, Wordsworth, without anything having been previously said to introduce the subject, called out suddenly from the top of the table to the bottom: "Davy, do you know the reason why I published the 'White Doe' in quarto?" "No, what was it?" "To show the world my opinion of it." He never read any works aloud but his own. At the time when Rob Roy, which has a motto taken from one of his poems, was published, he happened to be visiting a family who received the book the day it came out. They were all looking forward with eagerness to the new tale. Wordsworth seized the book, and every one expected him to read the first chapters aloud; but instead of doing this, he went to the bookcase, took out a volume of his own poetry, and read his poem aloud to the company.

We have Emerson's notes written immediately after two different visits to Wordsworth, paid with a year's interval. After the second, he writes: "He was nationally bitter on the French bitter on Scotchmen too. No Scotchman, he said, can write English. . . . His opinions of French, English, Irish, and Scotch seemed rashly formalised from little anecdotes of what had befallen himself and members of his family, in a diligence or stage-coach." After his first visit (in 1833) Emerson writes: "He had much to say of America, the more that it gave occasion for his favourite topic that society is being enlightened by a superficial tuition, out of all proportion to its being restrained by moral culture. Schools do no good. Tuition is not education.

He wished to impress on me and all good Americans to cultivate the moral, the conservative, &c. . . . He pro

ceeded to abuse Goethe's Wilhelm Meister heartily. It was full of all manner of fornication. It was like the crossing of flies in the air. He had never gone farther than the first part; so disgusted was he that he threw the book across the room. . . . He cited his sonnet 'On the Feelings of a High-minded Spaniard,' which he preferred to any other (I so understood him), and 'The Two Voices'; and quoted, with evident pleasure, the verses addressed to the Skylark." These jottings give us an excellent idea of what Wordsworth was in ordinary intercourse: the contemptuous verdicts passed on all foreign races, the objection to modern civilisation (the same which the Mohammedans in Asia and Africa prefer against it to this day) that it is compatible with great immorality; the eulogy on conventional morality as the societypreserving element (true morality being the most radical element in existence), the displeasure with Goethe (which reminds us of Novalis), and the recital of his own verses as finale!

Emerson sums up his impressions in the following words: "His face sometimes lighted up, but his conversation was not marked by special force or elevation. . . . He honoured himself by his simple adherence to truth, and was very willing not to shine; but he surprised by the hard limits of his thought. To judge from a single conversation, he made the impression of a narrow and very English mind; of one who paid for his rare elevation by general tameness and conformity."

In 1843 Wordsworth and Dickens met for the first time. Wordsworth had a great contempt for all young men, and the mutual friend at whose house the meeting took place was, consequently, curious to learn his impression of the great humorist. "After pursing up his lips in a fashion peculiar to him, and swinging one leg over the other, the bare flesh of his ankles appearing over his socks, Wordsworth slowly answered, Why, I am not much given to turn critic on people I meet; but, as you ask me, I will candidly avow that I thought him a very talkative, vulgar young person-but I dare say he may be very clever. Mind, I don't want to say a word against him, for I have never read

a line he has written.' Some time after this the same querist guardedly asked Dickens how he had liked the Poet Laureate? Like him? Not at all. He is a dreadful old ass.'”1

The reader will naturally refuse to subscribe to so sweeping a judgment. But so much is certain, that in private intercourse there must have been something extremely irritating about Wordsworth. A contemporary declares that when he spoke he blew like a whale, and uttered truisms in an oracular tone. The word "truism" is applicable to more than his verbal utterances; it applies to the whole reflective and didactic side of his poetry. In it there is no remarkable force or passion, but a Hamlet-like dwelling upon the great questions of "to be or not to be." "Birth, death, the future, the sufferings and misdeeds of man in this life, and his hopes of a life to come; the littleness of us and our whole sphere of knowledge, and the awful relations in which we stand to a world of the supernatural-these, if any," says Masson, "are the permanent and inevitable objects of all human, as they were peculiarly of Wordsworth's, contemplation and solicitude." But these ideas, lying, as they do, rather at the circumference of the sphere of our knowledge than within it, unfortunately tempt us into certain ancient and well-worn tracks of thought that lead nowhere; they go round in a ring, and we can follow them with a tranquil and dignified melancholy, but without much benefit either to ourselves or others. The fact that Wordsworth is perpetually finding his way to this said circumference of the sphere of our knowledge, which adherents of the so-called revealed religions regard as the natural centre of our thoughts, has contributed more than anything else to prevent his fame, great as it is in England, from spreading to any considerable extent in other countries.

When Coleridge made Wordsworth's personal acquaintance, the latter had already written enough to show plainly what was the nature of his originality. What struck Coleridge in Wordsworth's poetry "was the union of deep

1 R. S. Mackenzie: Life of Dickens, p. 243.

' Masson: Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and other Essays,