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·CAMBRIDGESHIRE TECHINICAL COLLEGE
DEPARTMENT OF
ENGLISH AMO SOCIAL STUDIES

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·A STUDY OF WORDSWORTH

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·A STUDY OF
WORDSWORTH
PY
J. C. SMITH

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·TO THE MEMORY OF
ERNEST DE SELINCOURT
TO WHOV ALL STUDEXTS
OF WORDSWORTH ARE
DEEPLY INDEBTED

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·CONTENTS
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15
1. ORGÂNIC SENSIBILITY
II. MEMORY
III. PLEASURE, FEL, LOVE.
IV. DREAM, HALLUCIXATION, REVERIE, Vision
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33
V. THEORY OF POETRY
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66
VI. POLITICS
VII. RELIGION
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·“Daddy Wordsworth."
E. FITZGERALD on W. WORDSWORTII.
.
"A cold, hard, silent, practical man
a man of
an immensc hicad and great jaws like a crocodilc's."
T. CARLYLE on W. WORDSWORTH.
" He Inid us as we lay at birth
On the cool flowery lap of carth."
M. ARNOLD on W. WORDSWORTII.
"The transitory Being that beheld
This Vision."
W. WORDSWORTU ON HIMSELF.

·CHAPTER 1 ORGANIC SENSIBILITY A POET, says Wordsworth, must be a man possessed of " more than usual_organic sensibility;": "Infant sensibility," he says again, is the "great birthright of our being"; in other men it is soon overlaid with a weight of custom, in_the_poet it is augmented and sustained. In the English of Wordsworth's and Jane Austen's day " sensibility" commonly connoted emotionalism, sensibilité, the temperament of a Marianne Dashwood. But that is not all that Wordsworth has in, mind. His poet is not simply a Man of Feeling. Feeling, of course, the poet must have, since poetry is in fact the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings and arises from emotion recollected in tranquillity: But before the emotions come the senses, and it is of them that Wordsworth is thinking when he adds the epithet "organic.” "Organic sensibility," then, means, or implies, in the first place the capacity_to_receive impressions through the senses : animal sensibility is De Quincey's paraphrase. If such is indeed the ground of the poetic temperament, we may fairly begin by asking what was Wordsworth's own native endowment in this article put about peculiarly 0 ng, as he the mind compound oleridge's remark will be discussed in a later chapter ; here I purpose merely to take stock of Wordsworth's native sense-endowment. In Wordsworth, as in most poets, the dominant ! sense was sight. "The most despotic of the senses," 1 ·A STUDY OF WORDSWORTH he calls it, and feared at one time that he might succumb to its despotism and become a mere epicure of visual sensations. Against this his nature instinctively strove by calling in the aid of his other senses, till such time as, having recovered his mental health, he was able to rally his creative and reflective powers. Wordsworth's visual sensibility needs no detailed illustration. His poems abound in images of things clearly and penctratingly seen. Penetratingly, I say ; his cye was not content to dwell on the coloured and varying surface of a scene, but sought to pierce through to what he calls its ideal and essential truth." He know, nonc better, that moving objects are the first to attract attention ; he had a keen eye and an apt phrase for the movements of birds- "the sailing glcad, The wheeling swallow, and the darting snipe" and had stood hundreds of times on his lawn watching the dancing of shadows amid a press of sunshine. He had observed with fine discrimination the gradations of colour in the mosses and lichens on a mountain-side, or at the sloping margins of a lake, was enraptured with a bed of potatoes in full bloom, and found much beauty in cabbages in their various stages of growth and decay, and even (to Shelley's horror) in the iridescent scales of dead trout." Still he was not Shelley's equal in descriptions of rapid movement, nor was he a paintcr-poct like Spenser, or Keats, or Tennyson, or Rossetti. Form and mass appealed to him more than movement, more even than colour. His senses, like his mind, craved objects that endure. It was his discovery of these powers of obscrvation in himself, a discovery which he made at the ? What the shepherd in Fidelity makes out first is " a stirring in a brake of fem." : The idea that Wordsworth suffered from a peculiar form of colour-blindness because he writes so often of yellow flowers is surely a delusion. He praises a good many yellow flowers because a good many flowers are yellow, age of ·ORGANIC SENSIBILITY 3 fourteen, that first set him on to be a poet, in order that he might record the multitude of natural_appear. ances which earlier poets had overlooked. Fresh and accurate observation of natural appearances is the chief merit of his two early poems, An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches. As this was the first of his poetic gifts to unfold, so it was the last to decay. Even in old va on the altar. Wordsworth's eye, though clear and penetrating, was not exceptionally quick. He had not the falcon's eye that Dorothy noted and admired in Scott; he would not have been the first to spot the sitting hare ! Before an object could make its full impression on his mind, he needed to return to it and brood over it. If the imagery of Descriptive Sketches is sometimes vaguer 717 ** in the hope of bearing away a more lively picture. When not thus on the march, he could prolong his observations. His gazing soul would dwell for a full half-hour upon a butterfly, or pore over the wings, sting, and laden thigh of a dim-eyed bee. When he went with Coleridge to see the bridge at Namur, Coleridge, we are told, was content to enjoy the general impression, but Wordsworth counted the arches with the accuracy and hardness of a stone-cutter." Hence that matter-of-factness which Carlyle found so satisfactory in his conversation, and Coleridge at times so distressing in his poetry. With all this devotion to minute particulars, Wordsworth was not a mere foreground artist. His gaze dwelt even more attentively on the larger features *T. C. Grattan, quoted by Harper, Life, 4, 346 ·4 A STUDY OF WORDSWORTH of the background-mountains, rivers, lakes, clouds, the sky. Wordsworth was pre-eminently the poet of mountains. Coleridge could write eloquently of Mont Blanc without having seen it except through the eyes of Frederica Brun; but Wordsworth's knowledge of his native mountains came from long observation and hard climbing. His Guide to the Lakes reveals a born gcographer's eye for country. Unaided by Ordnance Surveys he divined that the Cambrian Group consists of two dissected domes, carved into river-valleys that ray out from two centres like the spokes of a wheel that the raised bcach along its margin has been caused by an uplift of the land; and that alluvial deltas threaten to biscct its lakes. His eye penetrated into the solid mountains, discerning that their shapes were determined by the schist that composes them and their colour by the iron that veins it, while their arêtes were produced by the frost that drives wedge after wedge into their fissures. If he did not actually anticipate the Glacial Theory, he raised one of the questions that it was to answer when he asked how and whence came the "crratic blocks” sometimes seen on bald hill-tops and such of the boulders around tarns as have plainly not fallen from the abrupt and perilous rocks above. His description of corrie and tarn in Fidelity is as accurate scientifically as it is poctically impressive. He perceived, morcover, that mountains owe their grandeur not to size alone but to form, perspective, and atmosphere, the mists that veil them and the clouds that rake their summits.1 Some of Wordsworth's most characteristic similes are drawn from clouds : 15 17 "I wondered lonely as a cloud." 'Motionless as a cloud the old man stood," "'The Knight had ridden down from Wenslcy moor With the slow motion of a summer's cloud." "Poised, like a weary cloud in middle air." I 'This paragraph owes much to an unpublished paper by Dr Frederick Vlort.

·5 ORGANIC SENSIBILITY At times the clouds " set (his) thoughts a-going," and he watched them forming and dissolving with delight; in other moods, however, the sky seemed "no domain For fickle, short-lived clouds to occupy, Or to pass through ; but rather an abyss In which the everlasting stars abide." " The abyss of air," "the chasm of sky," are phrases characteristic of the poet whom boundlessness attracted irresistibly. 5 Of all“ skyey influences " none affected Wordsworth so much as sunset, sunrise, and moonlight. The most striking lines in his early Descriptive Sketches are those which describe a stormy sunset on the Lake of Uri; and the celestial light which once apparelled the earth to his eyes flashed on him for the last time on an evening of extraordinary splendour and beauty. Sunrise affected him still more profoundly. There is no ecstasy in his poetry so rapturous as the Wanderer's, when, from the naked top . JL.11.-5.kl. L. Less rapturous but not less sublime was the spectacle which the Solitary beheld, when, following the men who bore the dying pauper down the mountain-side in a dun mist, a single step freed him from the skirts of the blind vapour, and opened to his view Glory beyond all glory ever seen By waking sense or by the dreaming soul !" Earthly nature had wrought the effect upon the dark materials of the storm, but the appearance was of a heavenly city, a fabric of diamond and gold, with alabaster domes and silver spires, and in the midst ·A STUDY OF WORDSWORTH SC: a object like a throneman apocalypse of the abode souls in bliss. These two great visions come in The Excursion and tre assigned to imaginary characters; but Thc Prelude records two actual experiences which should be set beside them. The first of these marked an cpoch in the poet's life, and is clearly the original of the Wanderer's vision. It occurred during Wordsworth's first long vacation. He had spent a whole night in idle griety, dancing, ind flirtation, and was returning home to Hawkshead through the fields when morning broke, glorious," he says, "as c'er I had bcheid." Thie laughed at a distance; near at hand the solid mountains slone bright as the clouds; and in the meadows at his fect was all the swectness of a common dawn. His heart brimmed with thankful blessedness. “I made no rows," he says, " but vows were then made for me." From that hour, though as yet unconsciously, lic became a dedicated spirit. The second experience befell him some years later. He was climbing Snowdon at midnight with a friend and a guide. Mist cnveloped them, and they all fell silent, wr:ipt each in his own musings. For an hour they panted up in silence, Wordsworth leading " with prono brow and cager pace and thought, when suddenly the ground appeared to brighten : he looked up, and lo ! the full-orbed moon hung overhead naked in the cloudless azure, and at his fect stretched i silent sca of solid vapour, with mountain-tops rising through it like islands here and there vision whichi in his reflecting thought grew to be the emblem of it mind that feeds on infinity and broods over the abyss. In three of these four visions it will be observed that there is a kind of preparation in the previous mood or condition of the bcholder, so that when thc vision comes it comes with a shock of contrast which carries it far into his heart. To return to the question of "organic sensibility":

·ORGANIC SENSIBILITY ' Wordsworth's ear, though perhaps less kcen, and certainly much less informative, than his cye, Tras still very sensitive to a certain order of sounds, namely to natural sounds, especially the sounds of wood and water, in all volumes from the loudest to the faintest, from the stationary blasts of waterfalls or the roar of tempests down to the tinkling knell of a water-break or the whisper of the breeze in the harebells and the grass. In one respect, I believe, the poct's ear was even more important to him than his eye. Sounds did not feed his imagination as sights did, but they were singularly potent to stimulate it, to induce the poetic mood. Two sounds, in particular, used to set up, in him some working of the spirit, some inward agitation” friendly to the poet's task—the rocking of leafy trees in a high wind and the beating of rain upon the roof. It is not by accident that his most characteristic pnem begins- "'There was a roaring in the wind all night; The rain came heavily and fell in floods." It will be remembered that nothing exalted and enraptured Burns more than "to walk in the sheltered side of a wood or high plantation, in a cloudy, winter day, and hear a stormy wind howling among the trees and raving o'er the plains."? Keats too was rapturously excited by the wind " billowing" through a tree or across a field of barley. Another sound that moved Wordsworth to poetry was the sound of running water : he tells us that he composed thousands of lines by the side of the brook that runs through Easedale Again reminded of Burns and how he found the Muse as he wandered by himself " adown some trottin' burn's meander." But Wordsworth's ear had one serious limitation : he had little or no sense of tune. Coleridge says, Bums's First Common Place Book See Colvin's Life of John Keats, p so. We ·8 A STUDY OF WORDSWORTH simply that he had no ear for music; Quillinan is more definite, and presumably more exact : "Mr W.”, he “had no ear for instrumental music." Here he resembled Scott and differed profoundly from Milton, the poet whom in other respects he so often recalls. When Milton praises musicmm "Nor wanting power to mitigate and suage With solemn touches troubled thoughts, and chasc Anguish and doubt and fear and sorrow and pain From mortal or immortal minds.com" we feel that he speaks from the heart. Wordsworth has praised music too, but he praises it like one who has observed rather than felt its power, If the warbling of a wren in the ruins of Furness Abbey so enchanted him that he felt he could listen to it for ever, the enchantment came more from the setting than the song. The experience recorded in The Solitary Reaper was not his own but his friend Wilkinson's. The conclusion that Wordsworth was more sensitive to the volume and timbre of sounds than to varicties of pitch is confirmed by the language he uses in describing the notes or cries of birds. His descriptions of the notes of song-birds are quite conventional : wrens, larks, and linnets all warble," redbreasts“ trill, blackbirds “whistle," thrushes" pipe." But there is nothing conventional, on the contrary there is something highly individual, and (as we say) Wordsworthian, in the faint wail" or angry barking" of the lone cagle, the "iron knell” of the raven flying high across the sky, the clang” of waterfowl,' the "two-fold shout” of the cuckoo, the "tremulous sob ” of the owl, and the "frog-like tunc of the night-hawk. There is another element in music besides volume and pitch; there is the element of rhythm. Wordsworth's car for rhythm, though good, was not remarkable; he added no new metres to English verse. But rhythm is not peculiar to sound, as pitch is; and in fact the form of rhythm that appealed most to ·97 ORGANIC SENSIBILITY Wordsworth was not audible but visible rhythm cye-music" as he calls it "The soft ese-music of slow-aving boughs" cye-music which to the eyes of the Mad Mother seemed to make visible the wind that caused it: "The breeze I see is in the tree."1 In Wordsworth's day the term touch covered three senses which psychology now distinguishes, namely the sense of touch properly so called, the sense of temperature, and the muscular sense or sense of pressure. There is a remarkable passage in the Eighth Book of The Excursion which illustrates Wordsworth's use of the term. Speaking of the effect of factory life on children, he says :- "And even the touch, so exquisitely poured Through the whole body, with a languid will Performs its function, rarely competent To impress a vivid feeling on the mind Of what there is delightful in the breeze, The gentle visitations of the sun, Or lapse of liquid element--by hand, Or foot, or lip, in summer's warmth--perceived." Here it is clearly the sense of temperature that is uppermost in Wordsworth's mind when he speaks of touch. But another kind of touch concerns us more. The muscular sense, the sense of pressure, was -f singular moment to Wordsworth at one period of is life. It was through this sense that he retained, - regained, consciousness of the outside world in ose strange trances to which he was subject in his yhood. In childhood, he told Miss Fenwick, he and it most difficult to admit the notion of death a state applicable to his own being, and this not so ch from animal vivacity as from a sense of the Cf Prelude, vh, 45-6:- "Tossing in sunshine its dark boughs aloft As if to make the strong wind ·10 A STUDY OF WORDSWORTH This gate, “ With a indomitableness of the spirit within him. feeling congenial to this," hc continues, "I was often unable to think of cxternal things as having external cxistence, and I communed with all that I saw as somcthing not apart from, but inherent in my own inmaterial naturc. Many times when going to school lave I grasped at a wall or a trec to recall myself from this abyss of idealism to the rcality." He described The same experience to Bonamy Price in terms somewhat more explicit. Grasping a five-barred gate he said, There was a time in my life when I was often forced to grasp, like this, something that resisted, to be sure that there was anything outside of me. this bar, this road, these trees fell away from me and vanished into thought. I was sure of the existence of my mind--I had no sense of the existence of matter." This account of his trances hielps to explain a difficult passage in the original (1805) version of The Prelude. Wordsworth tells how he walked from Bristol to Racedown on a calın, mild day of autumn. In the afternoon he lay down at thc foot of a trec: Thus long I lay Cheard by the genial pillow of the earth Beneath my head, sooth' by a sense of touch from the warm ground, that balanced me, clse lost Entirely, sceins; nought, nought hearing, save When licre anıl there, about the grove of Oaks Where was my hou, an acorn froin the trees oll nudibly, and with a startling sound." What is incant by the words that balanced me"? In the light of what he told Miss Fenwick I tako them to mean that, with sight and hearing in abeyance, only the sense of touch, the contact of the warm carth with his lindy, saved him from falling into an "abyss of idealism." In this case the sense of temperature combined with that of pressure to keep him aware of the world outside of lim. Apart from sight and touch and (with an important qualification) hcaring. Wordsworth's endowment in the special senses was mcayre. His sense of smell, like >> ·ORGANIC SENSIBILITY 1 Scott's, was very obtuse. Southey says bluntly that he had no sense of smell. The assertion is perhaps too absolute. Wordsworth was aware, at Icast in theory, of the pleasures of smell, and even of its power of recall. In his famous letter to John Wilson he remarks that no human being can be so besotted and debased as to be utterly insensible to the colours, forms, or smell of flowers. In The IVhite Doe of Rylstone (1l. 1025 ff.) he speaks of the fragrance of the woodbine reviving the memory of hours when " from the pendent woodbine came Like odours, sweet as if the samne. Herc, however, an odour merely recalls a similar odour sensed on other occasions. Wordsworth comes nearer to recognizing the general evocative power of odours in the poem called Presentiments, where among the instruments of presentiment he names “A subtle smell that spring unbinds." But against these rather vague allu. sions we must set Southey's positive assertion. And Southey's assertion does not stand alone. We have James Payn's word for it that Wordsworth could not distinguish the scent of a bean-field in bloom, surely the most distinctive, as it is one of the most delicious, of country odours. The bean-flower's boon" meant nothing to him. For olfactory purposes that haughty nose of his was a barren promontory. This was a sad privation for a poet. For the sense of smell, though it brings little information to civilized man, has still a singular power to evoke, or revive, large diffused emotional moods, often highly favourable to poetic creation. When Lear calls for an ounce of civet to sweeten his imagination, he utters a cry of nature. Schiller kept a store of rotten apples in his desk to stimulate, if not to sweeten, his imagination. But neither rotting apples nor bean-flowers would have availed with Wordsworth. The fact that both Scott and Wordsworth were deficicnt at once in the sense of pitch and the sense ·12 A STUDY OF WORDSWORTH of smell makes us suspect some organic connection bctiveen these two senses. The suspicion grows when we observe that poets richly endowed in both tend sometimes to describe the one in terms of the other. Thic Duke in Tecclfth Night exclaims :- That strain again! It had a dying fall : O, it camc o'er my car likc the sweet south That breathes upon a bank of violets, Stealing and giving odour!” The song of the Lady in Comus riscs “ like a stream of rich distilled perfumes." And so, but more subtly, Shelley : "And thic hyacinth purple, and white and bluc, Which flung from its bells a sillet peal ancw Of music so delicate, soft, and intensc, It was felt like an odour within the sense." Such a simile would never have occurred in Wordsworth. But on onc occasion he used a simile equally remarkable, and as significant for him as Shelley's is for Shelley. Our authority is Southey. Wordsworth," hc writes, ' had no sense of smell. Once, and only once in his life, the dormant power was awakened ; it was by a bcd of stocks in full bloom, at a house which he inhabited in Dorsetshire, some five and twenty years ago, and he says it was like a vision of Paradise to him ; but it lasted only a few minutes, and the faculty has continued torpid from that time." Shelley Inight have compared that odour to the hells of Heaven; to Wordsworth "it was like a vision of Paradise"; so dominant in him was the sense of sight. It seems, then, that Wordsworth's car for music : was poor, and his sense of smell obtusc. His sense of temperature was not obtuse, as the lines I have quoted from The Excursion show; but neither was it exquisite, like keats's. It did little to fccd his imagination. Ho could not have written the first stanza of The Eve of St Agnes, still less such a blood-freezing line as "To thin): how they must ache in icy hoods and mails." $ ·ORGANIC SENSIBILITY a Nor was he at all richly endowed in the sense of taste, which brought such a wealth of imagery to Keats. He could no more have written the second stanza of the Ode to a Nightingale than the first stanza of The Eve of St Agnes. No: "harmonious," " luscious," "fragrant" -- these are no epithets for Wordsworth's world. It is an austere world; it is almost blenkbarc trees and mountains bare, But his deficiency in these special senses was more than outweighed by gift denied to Kcats, a sense of the sublime, a capacity for impressions which will call super-sensuous, leaving it an open question whether this capacity was simply an extraordinary heightening (hyperzesthesia) of the senses of sight and hearing the scnses in which he was most richly endowed or some mode of perception transcending sense. Wordsworth himself inclined to the latter interpretation. He believed that this ordinary, sensible world, the world of eye and car, was surrounded or interpenetrated by unknown modes of being : "Oh/ there is life that breathes not; Powers there are That touch each other to the quick in modes Which the gross world no sense hath to perceive, No soul to dream of." And he believed that he himsell possessed a scnse to perceive such powers, a sense akin to, or part of, that visionary, poiver " which was his peculiar and most precious gift. Silence is a condition highly favourable to vision, and Wordsworth possessed beyond all other pocts the ear for silence; silence that is something deeper far than quiet or case; "the silence that is in the starry sky"; nay, for :: silence beyond silenco- "silent lills and more than silent sky." Was it with the ear of flesh that the poet heard "the ghostly language of the ancient carth" Or caught beyond the uproa of the skating throng " an alien sound of melancholy, sent into the tumult from far distant huis?

·>> » "the A STUDY OF WORDSWORTH 1.4 At times the ancient carth presented a new face to his cycs. In the perilous sport of bird-nesting, when he hung on the face of a crag, suspended there, as it seemed, by nothing but the pressure of the blast, he viewed the world, as it were, from another planc, and then the sky " sccmcd not a sky Of carth, and with what motion moved the clouds !" Morcover, hc possessed or so it seems to me a remarkable sense of space; not of distance only there Milton far surpasses him but of space in three dimensions, of solidity : the solid mountains, solid frame of carth, " the round ocean, occan's liquid mass, the convex of the watery globe." One might almost venture to say that Wordsworth not only knew hut felt that the carth was round. Certainly he dcliberately courted, and perhaps at times achieved, a sensation the most massive of which human sense is capable, the sensation so impressively described in the opening pages of The Return of the Native, the sensation of the diurnal rotation of the carth. Skating on Esthwaite Lake, he tells us : When we had given our bodies to the wind, And all the shadowy banks on cither side Camc sweeping through the darkness, spinning still Thc rapid linc of motion, then at once Have I, reclining back upon my heels, Stopped short; yet still the solitary cliffs Wheeled by memcven as if the earth had rolled With visible motion her diurnal round." Such was the experience that was later to inspire the stark sublimity of "No motion has she now, no forcc ; She neither hears nor secs, Rolled round in cartli's diurnal course With rocks and stones and trees.' 11 ·CHAPTER II MEMORY . Tucse sense-impressions, visual and other but chiefly visual, were stored by Wordsworth in a memory which in his youth was wax to receive and marble to retain. It was in 1803 that he saw the Highland girl at Inversnaid and wrote of her beautiful abode : "In spots uke these it is te prize Our Memory, feel that she hath eyes." In 1843 he told Miss Fenwick : " And now approaching my sei cnty-third year, I have a most vivid remembrance of her, and the beautiful objects with which she was surrounded." Of Simon Lee he said: "I have, after an interval of forty-five years, the image of the old man as fresh before my eyes as if I had scen him yesterday." Of a couple in An Evening Walk- "And, fronting the bright west, yon oak errines Hlis darkening boughs and leaves in stronger lines" he said: "I recollect distinctly the very spot where this first struck me. It was in the way between Hawkshead and Ambleside, and gave me extreme pleasure." He was fourteen when that sight first struck him; after fifty-nine years he "recollected distinctly the very spot". And not the spot only, but the extreme pleasure which the sight gave him. He had as strong a memory for could never forget, he s his heart when he wa Upon the Sight of a Beautiful Picture, and remembered well the mysterious alle with which he used to listen to anything said about stoms and shipwrecks. Most of these memories, it will be obsen'cd, were pleasumble. Wordsworth was constitutionally a happy man, temem.. bering pleasant things better than painful, so that his ·A STUDY OF WORDSWORTH At times the ancient earth presented a new face to his cyes. In the perilous sport of bird-nesting, when he hung on the face of a crag, suspended there, as it scemed, by nothing but the pressure of the blast, he ricwed the world, as it were, from another plane, and then the sky sccmcd not a sky Of carth, and with what motion moved the clouds !" Morcover, he possessed or so it scems to me remarkable sense of space; not of distance onlythere Alilton far surpasses him but of space in three dimensions, of solidity : the solid mountains, the solid frame of carth, the round ocean, si ocean's liquid mass, the convex of the watery globc.” One might almost venture to say that Wordsworth not only knew but felt that the carth was round. Certainly hc deliberately courted, and perhaps at times achieved, a sensation the most massive of which human sense is capable, the sensation so impressively described in the opening pages of The Return of the Native, the sensation 01 the diurnal rotation of the carth. Skating on Esthwaite Lake, he tells us ; When we had given our bodies to the wind, And all the shadowy banks on cither side Cume swecping through the darkness, spinning still The rapid linc of motion, then at once Have I, reclining back upon my heels, Stopped short; yet still the solitary cliffs Wheeled by memeven as if the carth had rolled With visible motion her diurnal round." Si that was later to inspire the stark sublimity of "Xo motion has she now, no force ; She neither hears nor sces, Rollcd round in earth's diurnal course With rocks and stones and trecs."

·CILAPTCR II MEMORY Tucse sense-impressions, visual and other but chicfly visual, were stored by Wordsworth in a memory which in his youth was " wax to receive and marble to retain." It was in 1803 that he saw the Highland girl at Inversnaid and wrote of her beautiful abode: " In spots like these it is we prize Our Memory, feel that she hath eyes." In 1843 he told Miss Fenwick : “And now approaching my seventy-third year, I have a most vivid remembrance of her, and the beautiful objects with which she was surrounded." Of Simon Lee hc said: "I have, after an interval of forty-five years, the image of the old man as fresh before my eyes as if I had seen him yesterday.” Of a couplet in An Evening Walk- "And, fronting the bright west, yon oak entwincs Ilis darkening boughs and leaves in stronger lines"- he said: "I recollect distinctly the very spot where this first struck me. It was in the way between Hawkshead and Ambleside, and gave me extreme pleasurc." He was fourteen when that sight first struck him; after fiſty-nine years he recollected distinctly the very spot.". And not the spot only, but .1 -- his heart when he was impelled to write the sonnct Upon the Sight of a Beautiful Picture, and remembered well the mysterious awe usith which he used to listen to anything said about storms and sluipwrecks. Most of these memories, it will be observed, were pleasurable. Wordsworth was constitutionally a happy man, remcmbering pleasant things better than painful, so that his ·16 A STUDY OF WORDSWORTH memory was a constant source of happiness to him, the bliss of solitude," i filled with "genuinc images to heighton joy and cheer him in sorrow'. This precious gift he cultivated assiduously, dwelling in memory on the scenes over which he had pored in actual observation, and comparing them with the formative experiences of earlier days, till, like his own Wanderer, he achicred a power to fasten images upon his brain, on whose outlines he brooded till they acquired the liveliness of dreams. The most potent of all his earlier memories were thosc visionary experiences which he calls "spots of time." As he roamed by Penrith Beacon with Mary Hutchinson "in youth's golden gleam,” his joy was heightened by recollection of the visionary drearincss which had invested that scene when first he saw it, a tcrrified child ficcing from the hollow where a gibbet had stood. But what enhanced his present joy was not the contrasted drcariness of the remembered scene but its visionary quality, and the strength which he drow from an experience in which mind triumphed Of memories still deeper I shall speak when I come to deal with the Immortality Odc. Wordsworth's tenacious menory has a bearing on his theory and practice of poetry. It is related of Tennyson that, having read an account of the charge of the Light Brigade in which occurred the words, Somc one had blundered," he sat down at once, and, with the rhythm of these words in his head, wrote the poem in a few minutes. That was not Wordsworth's way. His works do indeed contain ten pocms which he describes as extempore. Of these the longest and best is the Effusion on the Death of James Hogg : the others amount to only 151 lines in all. With these exceptionsand I doubt if even these were all what he calls one of Cf. Bothnell Castle "Veniory, like sleep, hath powers which circanis obey, Dreams, vivid dreams, that are not fugitive; How little that she cherishes is lost!" Over sense.

·17 - - MEMORY them "extempore to the letter "_it is true to say that Wordsworth was not given to poetizing an experience immcdiately, not used, as he puts it, to make a present joy the matter of a song. Once indeed he did attempt to poetize a present sorrow. When his brother John was drowned, he tells us : "I began to give vent to my feelings in a poem; but I was overpowered by my subject, and could not proceed. I composed much, but it is all lost except a few lines, as it came from me in such a torrent that I was unable to remember it." His characteristic mode of composition was quite different. He blames Scott for going out with pencil and note-book, taking an inventory of Nature's charms, and weaving them into descriptions. He should have left his note-book at home, says Wordsworth, and taken all that he saw into a heart that could understand and enjoy; then, after several days, interrogated his memory. He would have found that much that was accidental had vanished; what remained would have becn the ideal and essential truth of the scene. It is obvious that in this censure of Scott's methods Wordsworth is describing his own, and that in defining poetry as arising from emotion recollected in tranquillity he is simply generalizing from his own practice. He would let an impression sink into his mind and "interrogate his memory " after an interval. But much would depend on the length of the interval. A new impression would remain for a time in his conscious memory, holding its place in the recurring pattern of his thoughts. Presently, however, it would sink into what Henry James has called "the deep well of the unconscious"; and there it might lie completely forgotten, if anything is ever completely forgotten; or, after a lapse of months, or even years, at the call of 1 Cf. The l'aggoner, Part IV * Nor is it I who play the part, But a shy spirit in my heart, That comes and goes will sometimes leap From hiding-places ten years deep."

·18 A STUDY OF WORDSWORTH some association, it might rise to the surface again, having undergone a change. Such mental alchemy is, in fact, a mark of the poetic tcmperament. There would be little of it in a mind like Macaulay's, where almost cvery impression, once registered, scems to have remained in the conscious memory, pigeon-holed for reference. But poets are distinguished from other men not more by their greater "organic sensibility " than by the greater richness and associative power of their subconscious memories. The nature of the change that a submerged experience undergoes depends, of course, on the other contents of the subconscious mind. In a mind like Coleridge's, fed largely on books, ideas attracted each other chicfly by force of literary association, as Professor Livingston Lowes has shown in The Road to Xanadu. But Wordsworth, though a wellread man, was no bookworm. His mind was stored with actual experiences, memories of what he had seen and felt, the most potent in attractive force being those "spots of time" to which I have referred. Now poctry may arise from cither of these levels, cithier (tlint is) from the conscious or from the unconscious memory. I will give an unambiguous example of cach kind : Wordsworth heard the story of Alice Fell on 16th February 1802 ; he wrote the poem on 12th and 13th Alarch of the same year, that is less than a month later, when it still kept its place in his conscious memory. Except that he uses the first person, and gives money to the host instead of to some respectable pcoplc in the town," he tells the tale as 'twas told to him. The incident is movingly reported, but it is not transmuted; it lacks the visionary touch, or has it only in the single line-- Sitting behind the chaisc alonc." Contrast the conception and slow gestation of Resolution and Independence. The poet is alone on the moor, rejoicing in the calm, bright sunrise after a (4 ·13 JI niz DE VIE voimassa mord Ez is SRE ISIS bet ottas per in మాజం - - cried misez, ITT Tesores untza Taldea cu toate stinzione di fare Berntssonne lecchio se out of he femei din faith and Sans ce Sounds of the permite D' INI of the : ستة لتori "We zile prirg Jones, weer. Hehed on a coat, this restrin, 25 bistcoat and coz y a todle and had an apena. His face was interesting. He had cat 74 z lexuose. John, who afterwards Virgot him for a Jess. He was of Sorter, b. ben born in the army. He kz22 525 2 good troman, and it pleased Gy! to blession with ten children, All these were dead bursa som he had not heard for many years, an. Historie Wizs to gather lecches, but not leechs were se, zad he had not strength for it. He lised ti besz, and was making his way to Carlisle, where he suld bsy a fete godly books to sell. He said istehien wet ser scarce. partly dwing to the dry sezem, hasi maze years they had been scarce. He supposed it vizs oring to their being much sought after, that they did nn breed fast, and were of slow growth. Lecches were formerly 23. 6d. per 100; they are nor 30s. He had been hurt in driving a cart, his body driven over, his stull fractured. He felt no pain till he recovered from his first insensibility. It was then late in the evening, when the light was just going away." It will be seen that, while many details have vanished, Wordsworth has preserved the "ideal and Essential truth" of the old man's appearance-his great age, his dark eyes, his frame bent double from $0 some ·A STUDY OF WORDSWORTH dirc constraint of pain " in time past, even the Scottish tone of his specch. But the sctting has been quite transformed. Actually, Wordsworth was not alonc when they met Dorothy was with him; they did not moct on the moor but on the Grasmcre road; not at sunrise but late in the evening; and the old man was not gathering Iceches but begging his way to Carlisle. Three things must be added which do not appear from mere comparison of the poem with Dorothy's Journal :- (1) The meeting took place on 26th September 1800 ; the poem wis not begun till 3rd May 1802. (2) The poem, lcgun on 3rd May, was not finished till 4th July, i.e, it took two months to write, while Alice Fell took only two days. (3) There is no reason to suppose that Wordsworth was dejected in September 1800; but in May 1802 he was dejected, partly for personal reasons, parily from anxiety about Coleridge, who was sinking decper into the opium habit, and whose Ode on Dejection had been written a month earlier, when Wordsworth, to whom it was originally addressed, was with him it Keswick. (The Odc on Dejcction was in fact Coleridge's reply to the first four stanzas of the Immortality Odc, which Wordsworth had brought with him to Keswick.) When Wordsworth came home, infected with Coleridge's dejection, his mind reverted by contrast (shall we say ?) to the figure of the old leech-gatherer, as a symbol of firmness in adversity, But he could not poctize that figure till he had placed it in such a setting as evoked his visionary power. IIcncc the sunrise, the roar of woods and distant waters, the moorland solitude, the solitary figure of the old man alone with him alone; licnce too the preparation for vision in the poet's mood of dejection supervening on exaltation. The result is a poem quintessentially Wordsworthian, not least in its moral core, that strength of soul which is our last place of relugc. ! The first draft was written in a single burst of inspiration which lasted five days; but it is jurorked over, and did not take its final shape till 4th July.

·CHAPTER III PLEASURE, FEAR, LOVE PLEASURE - When Wordsworth saw the silhouette of that oak against the sunset " in the way from Hawkshead to Ambleside," it gave him extreme pleasure. llere then is another essential element in the growth of a poet's mind. With his gifts of observa. tion Wordsworth might have made a name in Natural Science; indeed geologists have deplored the loss to their science of the observer who first called attention to the “perched” boulders that are sometimes seen to lie "couched on the bald top of an eminence." But science sechs only to advance knowledge; poetry aims at communicating pleasure. There is no article in his creed on which Wordsworth insists more firmly than this, that the poet's business is to give pleasure. Even when his subject is painful in itself, he must so treat it that the result will yield an overplus of pleasure, To communicate pleasure a poet must feel it, and feel it more intensely than other men; he must be possessed of a "more than usual" capacity not only for senseimpressions but for pleasure.' Defending Burns Wordsworth roundly maintains that the poet has licence to sympathize with and to celebrate even thpleasures of love and wine and the joy of battle. H did not avail himselt of that licence Praise of woman wine, and war was not his trade. He wrote no lov songs, no bottle-songs, and of battle-songs only cnou to show what he could do in that line if he chos Nor would he stoop to excite his readers with Got tales of mystery and horror, such were then in vog Wordsworth's so-called " Return to Nature among other things, that he turned his back on Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle. me ot ·STUDY OF WORDSWORTH supernatural and the sensational, “to pipe a simple song for thinking hearts." He would add to the sum of liuman happiness, to "joy in widest commonalty spread," ly cnlarging the sphere of human sensibility, cducating men's perceptions and ſeclings till they ccased to crave for vulgar stimulants and found continual pleasure in the common things that lay round them in Nature and in human lifc, Wordsworth's conception of pleasure was more than a piece of sthetic thcory. 'What it meant for him is revealed, almost casually, in the phrase " vital feclings of delight." That is its real significance : picksure is vital; it is a sign of life, like the bloom on the check of youth, as Aristotle put it. But Wordsworth went beyond Aristotle. For him pleasure has an absolute or mystical valuc, as a sign that our individual lives are rooted in a whole whose life is joy, are living branches of the tree of life, with its sap tingling in our veins. And not ours only: pleasure is not confined to men nor to what we commonly call scnticnt beings. Wherever there is life there is pleasurc. The daffodils dance for glee; the budding twigs take pleasure in the lireezy air. These are not more flights of fancy. When Wordsworth says " And 'tis my faith that every flower Enjoys the nir it brenthes," lic utters his deep conviction that the heart of the world beats in happiness. For the poet as poet pleasure has yet a further significance. Sense-impressions being the material of his art, it is along thic pulse of feeling that these are carried into the poct's licart, and rooted there, to bloom perhaps into imagery in duc season. A purc intclligence could not be a poct. il poet's thoughts are stccped in fccling. II. HAN...The feelings in which the poct's thoughts are steeped must be predominantly pleasurable if they are 10% warm his mind to the point of poctic creation.

·PLEASURE, FEAR, LOVE 23 Yet in his account of the growth of his own mind and of the mind of the Wanderer, who is his other self, Wordsworth gives, if not the foremost, certainly the second place to an emotion which at first sight seems to be incompatible with pleasure in any form--the emotion of fear. There is nothing more remarkable in Wordsworth's psychology than his insistence on the formative value of fear. He pours contempt on the model child of the Rousseauites, who is superior alike to natural and supernatural fear," unless "--and the exception is significant-"unless it leap upon him in a dream." For himself he confesses that he was attracted, almost to excess, by that beauty, which, as 35 Milton sings, "Hath terror in it." The scenes of his boyhood were fastened on his affections not only by "pleasure and repeated happiness," but by the impressive discipline of fear.” The foundations of the Wanderer's mind were laid "In such communion, not from terror free." Fear sat in his heart, "a cherished visitant," before he had learned the lesson of love, Finally, and conclusively, he says of his own childhood :- "Fair seedtime had my soul, and I grew up Fostered alike by beauty and by fear." Once, when caught in a storm at sea, Wordsworth thought with a touch of envy that Byron and Shelley would probably have rejoiced in a situation from which he was not a little glad to escape; but he consoled himself with the reflection that every man has his fears of some kind or other, and no doubt they had theirs. What kind of fear was it that " fostered" Wordsworth's soul ? In the first place, it was not horror, not that shudder of the mortal flesh under which the soul sickens. From that he was immune, and he rive 1 m ·A STUDY OF WO tance of his immunity and a stranger reason for it. on after he went to school at Hawkshead a bather es drowned in the lake. The water was dragged, and last the dead man rose to the surface, " bolt upright, with his ghastly face.” The child-he was only eight cars old-saw that spectral shape of terror, yet no soul-debasing fear possessed him ; for, poring on fairy tales and romances, he had already beheld such scenes in fancy, but beheld them in ideal settings that purged them of their horror. Still, though immune from fleshly horror, and freer than most men from the vulgar dread of death or danger - he was a daring cragsman at school-Wordsworth appears to have been subject at times to accesses of panic. The instances which he gives himself are taken from his boyhood; but there is an incident of his manhood, related by Dorothy, which scems to be not without significance in this connection. It happened soon after they came to Grasmere. Bad news had come from Coleridge, and Wordsworth went out alone to walk in John's Grove. Later in the evening Dorothy went to look for him. She found him in a strange state, “ He had been surprised and terrified," she says, " by a sudden rushing of winds, which seemed to bring carth, sky, and lake together, as if the whole were going to enclose him." " He had been surprised and terrificd;” and though his terror was plainly a matter less of the nerves than of an imagination already Wrought upon by fears for Coleridge, it is also plai that its origin was not wholly imaginary. The characteristic form which this emotion of fc took in his boyhood was somewhat different a differently excited, less akin to natural than to sup natural fear, as we may gather from two instan related in The Prelude: One of the favourite sports among the boys Hawkshead was the snaring of woodcocks, whic winter settled on the hilltops round the village as the quails in the descrt of Sinai. On moon ·PLEASURE, FEAR, LOVE nights Wordsworth used to climb the hills alone, to secure the birds that had been aught in his snares. Sometimes hc yielded to temptation, and took birds from other boys' snares, "And when the deed was done," he says, 1-t'il Another time he stole a boat and rowed out into the lake.. Undeterred by the mountain echoes, he fixed his eyes on a ridge which formed the horizon, and drove the boat along. Suddenly from behind the horizon-ridge a new peak rose, black and huge, towering up between him and the stars, menacing him, striding after him. His heart failed him, and he stole back to the shore. But for many days after his brain worked with a dim sense of unknown modes of being; a darkness hung on his thoughts, blotting out all familiar shapes; and huge and mighty forms, that do not live like living men, moved slowly through his mind by day, and were a trouble to his dreams. The first of these incidents belonged to his tenth year, and so apparently did the second. On both occasions, it will be observed, the boy was alone in the night; and (what is still more important) the impression of fear fell on a mind made sensitive by conscious guilt. Trivial as they seem to us, both acts were acts of stealth, affronting righteous Nature in her sanctuary. Such were the experiences that Wordsworth had in mind when, in the Immortality Ode, he gave thanks and praise for those Akin to this experience, but not the same, is that 1 The lake, we now know, *** Ull water, not Esthwaite. с ·A STUDY OF WORDSWORTH which he has recorded in Nutting. There, however, Nature, though reproachful, is not menacing, and the emotion aroused is not fcar but remorse. Realization of the part that fcar had played in the growth of his own mind came to Wordsworth with the force of a new discovery. The fashionable philosophy of that age regarded fear as a slavish cmotion, fostered, if not aciually engendered, by kings and pricsts to keep men in subjcction, the langman's whip to hold wretches in order, Finlightened thinkers like Godwin saw nothing in fear but the vulgar drcad of death and punishment, here or hercafter. It did not cnter into their minds to conceive that fear may be an ingredient in such lofty sentiments as wonder, awe, worship, cven love. Wordsworth was the first in that age to recognize that fear, though in excess it may paralyze the mind, can also sensitize it, and agitate us with thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls. The truth thus rcdiscovered hy Wordsworth was not in fact unknown to earlier ages. " 'The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge," says the Book of Proverbs. “It is good, say the Eumenides in Eschylus, that fear should sit as the guardian of the soul, forcing it into wisdom.” And Shakespcare makes the wise Lafcu declare: “We make trifics of terrors, ensconcing ourscives into seeming knowledge when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fcar." When we speak of Wordsworth's " optimism" we must never forget this underlying sense of the unknown and awful power on which our dark ſoundalions rest,' the darkness with which our haughty life is crowned, the dread foundations of the towers of Love itself. III. Love. This was not the only discovery that Wordsworth made when he threw off his allcgiance to Godwin. In the cold fit that followed his return from ? Excursion, iv, 970. • Effusion on the Death of James llogg, 1. 29. 5 liscellaneouis Sonnels, iii, 44, 10.

·: I'LEASURE, FEAR, LOVE 27 France he had cast about him for intellectual support to his Revolutionary faith, and found it for a time in Godwin's Political Justice, Godwin was a thoroughgoing sensationalist : he held that at birth the mind is a tabula rasa, capable only of receiving, senseimpressions, which leave on it those traces that he calls ideas. Out of these Reason somehow cmerges and proclaims the pursuit of the general good as the onc rule of conduct. Emotions like gratitude and filial love are childish ; tradition and convention arc superstitions. The Godwinian sage will be guided solely by a calculation of the consequences of his actions, and will choose at every juncture the course which his independent intellect, unbiassed by instinct, emotion, tradition or convention, concludes to be best calculated to promote the general good. A concrete, feeling mind like Wordsworth's could not long rest content with this frigid moral arithmetic, and in The Borderets wc sec him sloughing it off. The hero of that tragedy is a would-be Godwinian, who on 3 rational alculation of consequences " leaves a blind old man to perish on the moor, and is then overwhelmed with unavailing remorse. Godwinism was bankrupt for the author of The Borderers. By that time, happily, he had passed the dead centre where he "abandoned moral questions in despair." As he renewed his youth in the sunshine of Dorothy's society and Coleridge's friendship, he began to meditate a great philosophical poem, and in preparation for it to review the growth of his own mind and explore the penetralia of human nature in the light of self-knowledge. Experience taught him power" not in his abstract person bul ul nu uppur pole from it, in his prima! instincts and affections, looking for them not among Godwinian calculators of consequences, humble men, among women but among ·28 A STUDY OF WORDSWORTH and children and crazy or half-witted persons, where these primal instincts and affections "Exist more simple in their clements, And speak a plainer language." The powers of which Wordsworth was in search as decper and more authoritative than reason were cmincntly those which erect man above himself, and reach out towards that infinitude which is his truc destiny-hope, effort, cxpectation, desire, and above all love. It is their infinite capacity for love that exalts poor women like Betty Foy, or Margaret of The Ruined Cottage, or that other Margaret who waits day and night for her lost son, “With love and longings infinite." The capacity for infinite love is brought out above all by suffering, which in itself “shares the nature of Infinity.” Extreme suffering may drive a mother mad, but it cannot quench maternal love. Suffering that brcaks down the palcs and forts of rcason in the Mad Mother, and Ruth, and Martha Ray, filled Wordsworth not only with pity but with awe. Even in idiots, crazed hy nature not by suffering, cven in such "naturals "he found something sacred, that often made him apply to them in his own mind the sublime cxpression of Scripture, " Their life is hidden with God.' in children he saw man's patent of divinity in intimations of immortality such as his own childhood had known. The true meaning of We Are Seven is obscured by the opening stanza. That stanza was in fact thrown off by Colcridge. Wordsworth accepted it laughingly; but in speaking of it long afterwards to Miss Fenwick, he said that his own childish bclief that he could never dic came not so much from the source of animal vivacity as from a sense of the indomitableness of the spirit within him. Morcover, in his essay Upon Epitaphs, Wordsworth avows his conviction that we could not continue to love beings ·PLEASURE, FEAR, LOVE 29 whom we know to be mortal unless this sense of immortality were anterior to any experience of death. For thesc reasons I believe, in spite of Coleridge, that the little girl in IVe Are Seven refuses to admit the notion of death, not because she feels her life in every limb, but because of that sense of oneness with the Unseen which is the theme of the Immortality Ode. Finally, but at a date somewhat later than that of the first Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth came to recognize kindred powers of instinct and affection in the lower animals. He had long been a pleased observer of the play of animals, and watched the sportive fawn, or the blythe mountain roe, or the hare running races in her mirth, or the kitten at play with the falling leaves, all tcaching him, as I have said, that wherever there is life there is joy. But now he came to look on his dumb fellow-creatures with a deeper feeling, and to see in the sublime devotion of the spaniel in Fidelity, and the intense, tender sympathy of the little dog Music, "A soul of love, love's intellectual law." Love, he perceived, is not peculiar to man, but comes wherever life and sense are given by God. And thus human anguish may be tempered by sympathies "Aloft ascending, and descending deep, Even to the inferior kinds." Love, then, is one of the hiding places of man's power. Yet Wordsvorth was not a love-poet in the ordinary sense. He deliberately denied himself the theme which in all ages has been the chief inspiration of lyric poetry. He once said that if he had written poems of passion, they might have been more ardent than his principles allowed ; and the claim, which caused an earlier generation of readers to smile, seems less extravagant now that we know of his own passion for Annette Vallon and can read the great lovc-passage in l'audracour and Julia in the light of it The fact The Ilhite Doe of Ry litone, Dediabon, ll. 43. 44 ·30 A STUDY OF WORDSWORTH remains that he wrote no poems of passion. Yet he has left us five pocms, the famous “Lucy” poems, which, though not passionatc, breathe an affection so deep and tcnder that we can only call it love. Four of them were written in Germany in the winter of 1798-1799, and the fifth soon after his return to England. We do not know who Lucy was, nor indeed if there ever was a Lucy. Coleridge believed that she was Dorothy, and it is a fact that in the poem beginning "Among all lovely things my love hath been "ma poem which he never reprinted" Lucy » does stand for Dorothy. But it is also a fact that in the original version of the poem the name was “Emma"! Apart from this I find Coleridge's idea incredible : Dorothy did not die young, nor did Naturc rear her form to stately hicight. Other clues break in our hands in the same way. Lucy dwelt beside the springs of Dove," and there is a Dove in the Peak District which Wordsworth visited one long vacation; but there is also a Dove in Patterdale, not out of reach from Hawkshcad ; and a Dorcy in North Wales, which Wordsworth might have visited when he stayed with his friend Jones. Two lines in the first draft of the poema " And she was graceful as the hroom That flowers by Carron's side seem to promise a clue, till we find that Wordsworth cook the broom from Langhorne, I conclude, though without much conviction, that Lucy is an idcal figure, an idcal of English maidenhood, born of the poet's longing for England during that " mclancholy drcam” of exile in Germany, and touched with memories of Vary Hutchinson, who had been his first love, and to whom his heart was now returning, The love that inspired Wordsworth's poetry was not I love this information to Professor E. de Selincourt. : In a variant on Prelude, xi, 261-3, he wrote of her as "the maid To whom wen: breathed my first fond vows."

·PLEASURE, FEAR, LOVE 31 put it, sexual love; it was the love of Nature and Man, of country and freedom, family and friends. His love of Nature had three phases : in boyhood she was endcared to him merely as the scene of his boyish sports; in youth he came to love her for hersell, love her with passion, but as yet with no conscious sense of her Divinity. That came with manhood, and will be dealt with more appropriately in the chapter on Wordsworth's religion. So too I reserve to the chapter on his politics any discussion of the love of country and freedom that inspired his great political sonnets and his Tract on the Contention of Cintra. As for love of Man, the disciplc of Beaupuy could say truly enough in 1792 that his ficart was all given to the people and his love was chcirs. Indced he never lost his love for the people, though at times he lost his faith in them. But love of the people en masse was too abstract and, as Aristotle would 100 watery a sentiment to inspire his poetry. Moreover, he was a countryman, unfamiliar with the aspirations and emotions of crowds. He was not destined to chant " the fierce confederate storm Of sorrow, barricaded evermore Within the walls of cities"; but rather “To hear humanity in woods and groves Tipe solitary anguish." It was not of Man but of men that he sang. And the keynote of his song was family love. In Wordsworth family love was a passion. He had "a violence of affection," Dorothy tells us, which showed itself in a thousand attentions- * little, nameless, unremembered, acts Of kindness and of love" und in 2 tendemess that never slept. Such affection was indeed a passion, even a tragic passion. The death of his brother John in 1805 changed the whole current of his thoughts; the death of his boy Thomas aged him by ten years; the death of Dora broke his hcart.

·32 A STUDY OF WORDSWORTH These emotions very seldom found utterance in verse. When John died he attempted, as has been related, to give vent to his feelings in a poem, but the subject overpowered him. Only the death of his little Catherine inspired (but how long after we know not) the most poignant sonnet in English literature : "Surprised by joy-impatient as the Wind I turned to share the transport-Oh! with whom But Thec, decp buried in the silent tomb, That spot which no vicissitude can find ? Love, faithful love, rccalled thcc to my mind But how could I forget thee? Through what power, Even for the least division of an hour, Have I been so beguiled as to bc blind To my most grievous loss l_That thought's return Was the worst pang that sorrow crer borc, Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn, Knowing my heart's best treasure was no more ; That neither present time, nor years unborn Could to my sight that heavenly face restore." As an expression of personal grief, this sonnet stands alone in his works, "But the very strength of feeling which choked the utterance of personal grief enabled him to enter into and to express with unequalled power the love of brother for brother, of father for son, and of mother for child, in The Brothers, and Michael, and The Affliction of Margaret. He loved his friends too, loved them deeply, if not with the violence of affection that he felt for his own family. The best of his later poems were written when he was moved by the suffering or death of old friends. There are lines, indeed there are whole stanzas, in his Eftsion on the Death of James Hogg that sound like cchocs from his prime. And agrin it may be noted that the death of Coleridge, which inspired the noblest and most heartfelt of these lines, liad taken place sixteen months before, while the immediate occasion of the poem was the death of one who had been little more than an old acquaintance.

·CHAPTER I DREAM, HALLUCINATION, REVERIE, VISION Much of what I have said in Chapter 1 about Wordsworth's "organic sensibility". might have been said with almost equal truth about his sister Dorothy. Her eye for Nature and her delight in Nature were as keen as her brother's, at least when she was by his side. Yet Dorothy, though she sometimes attempted verse, was not a poet, because with all her sensibility she lacked creative power. It was not mere sensibility that Wordsworth claimed for himself as poet; he claimed to possess "creative_sensibility," "a forming hand," a plastic power," an eye that lent its objects an auxiliar light." Here we touch the real nerve of poetry: Those other gifts of sense and emotion only provide its materials and occasions; this is its active principle. The poet creates. How and in what sense does the poet create ? To answer that question fully we should have to follow an experience when it sank into the poet's mind and watch its transmutation there. Unfortunately, at this, the hardest and most obscure point of our enquiry, Wordsworth's direct guidance is of little avail," "I feel that I am trifling," he says when he tries to describe the trance into which he fell when first he entered London; and he might have said the same of his faltering attempts to communicate the incommunicable secret of poetic creation. At this point, therefore, I propose to abandon the direct line of approach which I have followed up to now, and make a détour, in the hope of catching a glimpse of the creative process, as it were by a side-glance. This détour takes us through the country inhabited by Wordsworth's dreams, hallucinations, reveries, and visions, ·34 A STUDY OF WORDSWORTH 1. DREAMS. We do not commonly think of Wordsworth as a dreamer. Coleridge, yes; but surely not that "cold, hard, silent, practical man," whom Carlyle portrayed with his "immense hcad and great jaws like a crocodile's." 1 I fear that Carlyle's amazing gift of words sometimes did duty for observation and insight. If the use of clichés had not dulled our feeling for words, we could not fail to hc struck by the frequency and strangeness of Wordsworth's references to dreams. Here arc some instances : the list might casily be extended : The sweet Highland girl and her lovely abode together sceni Like somcthing fashioned in a dream." Listening to the street-fiddler are twenty souls happy as souls in a dream." <6 11 The high beatitude of youth cnjoys "waking thoughts more bright than happiest dreams." “The liveliness of drcams." Almost as vivid as a dream." The varnish and the gloss of dreams." 'The glory and the freshness of a dream." But as for the great lodge, you might as well Hunt half a day for a forgotten dream." These are truly surprising similes. If we are honcst with oursclves speak for those who are not poctswe shall own that our dreams, as a rule, are not lovely, nor happy, nor lively, vivid, bright, glorious, fresh. On the contrary they are commonly vague in fcelingtonc, blurred in outline, dull in colour, inconscqucnt, and above all fugitive. But to Wordsworth apparently the world of dreams" Dreams, books, arc cach a world”-was something more beautiful, beatific, and vivid than waking reality. Not to admit this means Sce Gavan Duffy's Conversations trith Carlyle, p. 55.

·DREAM, HALLUCINATION, REVERIE, VISION 33 simply that we have failed to recognize Fordarorth's stubborn fidelity to experience in his use of sonds. But we are not confined for evidence to similes from his poems. The Prelude and The Excursion put the matter beyond doubt. The Wanderer of The Excursiot 1125 reared " In dreams, in study, and in ardent thought" Wordsworth's own earliest memories were of the River Derwent, which ran at the foot of his father's garden, "And from its fords and shallows sent a voice That flowed along my dreams." After his theft of the boat on Ullswater, huge and mighty forms were a trouble to his dreams. After his stay in Paris on the morrow of the September massacres, and his stolen visit to that city a year later, when he came face to face with the Terror, and saw Gorsus guillotined before his eyes, after these terrible experiences he suffered for months, nay for years, with few respites, from continual or recurrent nightmaces. Night after night he lived again through the Terror, in ghastly visions of dungeon and scaffold : “Then suddenly the scene Changed, and the unbroken dream entangled ine In long orations, which I strove to plead Before unjust tribunals, with a voice Labouring, a brain confounded, and a sense, Death-like, of treacherous desertion, felt In the last place of refuge my own soul." These nightmares persisted for two or three years, and were thus movingly recorded some ten years later. So much for Wordsworth's proneness to dreams. Now there is a dream recorded in Book y of The Prelude, so vivid and articulate, and in its crazy way so significant, that it makes a complete poem by, itself. Its circumstances, moreover, are set down with such faithful particularity as to fumish a complete psychological explanation. And its after-elaboration in the poet's waking mind, taken with the droom itself doo ·36 A STUDY OF WORDSİVORTH afford us a glimpse into the process of crcation. This was not, like Kubla Khan, a poem composed in a drcam, but a dream composed into a poem." (I find no evidence that Wordsworth ever dreamed in verse.) It happened thus :- Onc still summer noon the post was seated alone in a scaside cave reading Don Quixote, when he fell to musing on a subject which often weighed on his mind about that time--the durablc naturc of poctry and geometric truth, and the pity it was that treasures so hardly won by the human spirit should be lodged in caskets so frail, As he muscd thus, what with the stillness and warmth and the glitter of the waves, he dropped asleep. In his sleep he seemed to be in a boundless sandy descrt, and by his side an Arab on a dromedary with a lancc in his hand. Under one arm he bore a stone, and in the opposite hand a shell of surpassing brightness. The stone, he said, was Euclid's Elements; the shell was something still more precious. Held to the poet's car it uttered, in a tonguc unknown yet understood, loud prophecy of the approaching destruction of mankind by dcluge. That prophecy, the Arab said, would be fulfilled, and he was even then on his way to bury the stone (which was Geometric Truth) and the shell (which was Poctry). The poct followed him, and now he seemed to bc Don Quixote, yet still a Bedouin of the desert. But glancing back they sasi, diffused over half the wilderness, a bed of glittering light; whereupon the Arab, urging his unwieldy beast to speed, ficd away," with the fleet waters of a drowning world in chase of him," and the poct awoke in terror. And there was the sea before him and the book at his side. In this dream we can account at once for all the clements of the imagery: the mounted figure with his lance, the stone, the shell, the bed of glittering light- WC SCC at once where all these came from. We the meaning, such as it is, simply prolongs the poet's last waking thought; and that the terror in which the see that ·DREAM, HALLUCINATION, REVERJE, VISION 37 dream dissoives is merely the culmination of that mood of awe and melancholy in which it arose. We cannot, of course, see the shaping spirit which out of those images, that thought, that mood, built a dreamstructure as vivid, coherent, and significant as a work of art. But, with all its materials, conditions, and results before us, we come as near to seeing it at work as perhaps we can ever do from outside. What follows is no less illuminative :- this quest” Proliacleu anung erciless suuluues Have shaped him wanderung upon Here is one dream at least that Wordsworth did not forget, but remembered in all its details and frequently recalled through many years. His waking imagination played with the creature of his dream, giving him an individuality, a history, a local habitation, and a purpose-a puspose with which, in fancy, he even sympathized. For, out of metaphor, it was a familiar thought with Wordsworth that in a world which so many millions are eager to manage and replenish, there is room and need for a few choice spirits dedicated to pure contemplation," anchorites of knowledge," as he calls them in The Excursions 11. HALLUCINATION.--From these dreams of sleep I pass to the one recorded occasion on which Wordsworth suffered from an hallucination. It was in Paris, in October 1792. When he had passed through the city Bergson says that dreams seldom anse out of what has been preoccupying the waking mind; when they do, the dreamer &wakes exhausted. * We do not know for certain when Wordsworth had this dream of the mounted Bedouin, but from its place in The Prelude it would seem to belong to hus Cambridge days. > Excursion V, 29-36.

·38 A STUDY OF WORDSWORTH eleven months carlier, it was clamorous with debate in the .Issembly and the rival clubs. Now it lay hushed in fear. A month before a gang of cut-throats had been let loose on the prisons where the Royalists lay, and after a series of mock trials had butchered fourteen hundred of them in cold blood. As he sat in his high and loncly room aborc the silent city, the thought of these September massacres, a barc month old, looded the poet's brain : the fcar gonc by pressed on him almost like a fear to come; what has been, he thought, will be; such massacres will recur: and in this way he wrought upon himself till he seemed to hear a voice that cried to the whole city, "Sleep no more.” "The trance, he continucs, "fied with the voice to which it had given birth." A "trance" he calls it: it was not a dream-he was foverishly awake; it was a pure hallucination, like the voice that Macbeth heard after the murder of Duncan, a hallucination born of terror as Macbeth's was of guilt. Two other things are notcworthy in this experience. The voice which sccmcd to come from without him came really from a subconscious memory of Shakespeare's linc, Still it cried, 'Slcep no more,' to all the house," as is shown by the words in which Wordsworth describes " a voice that cricd To the whole city, Sleep no more. And this perhaps explains why, even in an imagination so predominantly visual as Wordsworth's, the hallucination took the form of a sound, III. WAKING DREAMS OR REVERIES.Though hc never again suffered, so far as we know, from hallucinations, Wordsworth frequently indulged, most frequently it would scem) at this period of his life, in exercises of fancy which he calls waking dreams or reveries. I use the words “indulged " and " cxercises " with intent: thcsc waking dreams were voluntary and pleasurablc. Ac Cambridge he would often stand on ·DREAM, HALLUCINATION, REVERIE, VISION 39 moonlight nights at the foot of a lovely, iry-clad ash-trec, and gazing at it conjure up phantoms as fair as Spenser himself could have created. Walking on the banks of the Loire with Beaupuy, he would sometimes let his mind slip away from their serious conversation, to people the woods where François I had lived and loved with the creations of Italian and English romance ; would hear in the noise of an unseen horseman's approach the hoofs of Erminia's palfrey, or Angelica's, thundering down the sylvan glades, sec knights jousting beneath the trees, or catch from some hidden dell the loud merriment of Satyrs dancing around the captive Serena. More impressive than these romantic fancies was the waking dream, or series of waking dreams, which Wordsworth had next year on Salisbury Plain. It was in August 1793. He had spent all July in the Isle of Wight, waiting on, "Through a witole month of calm and glassy days," in the hope (as I guess) of persuading some skipper to smuggle him over one night to France. Baffled by the continued calm, he decided at last to postpone his attempt till the Equinoctial gales should be blowing, and set off westward, meaning perhaps, to fetch up at his friend Jones's house in North Wales. For three days he wandered over Salisbury Plain on foot and alone. As he viewed Stonehenge and the other Druidical remains with which the plain is strewn, Time rolled back with him and he saw the dim past of Britain "in vision clear" : skin-clad Britons strode over the downs; the clash of spears was heard; then darkness, lit by the flames of human sacrifice and rent by the groans of victims; then light again, and in the light all round him long-bearded teachers with white staves pointing starward and carthward swaying to sweet music. An extraordinary experience, but not unique in its kind. I know," says Dr Oliver Gogarty, speaking obviously from personal observation or personal ·A STUDY OF WORDSWORTH 11 1 experience, " that there are times, given the place which is capable of suggesting a phantasy, when those who are sufficicntly impressionablc may perceive a dream projected as if external to the dreamy mind; a waking dream due both to the dreamer and the spot. These words of Dr Gogarty's exactly describe the conditions, both as to the dreamer and the spot, which produced Wordsworth's reverie on Salisbury Plain, though surely few reveries can ever have been so vivid or so prolonged. Vivid as they were, these waking dreams were not hallucinatory. The drcam images were phantasies and known to be such, pictures projected on to the screen of the plain, but not mistaken for part of the screen. Nor, on the other hand, were they visions" in the sense in which I am about to use that tcrm. Vision is revelatory; but these waking dreams did not in truth reveal "The thing that hath been as the thing that is." They were phantasics, as I have called them, constructed by a poet of extraordinary visual sensibility out of mcmorics of what he had read about the Ancient Britons. Consequently his normal perceptions were not wholly in abeyance; the actual scene was still perceived, perceived indeed as a background to the crcations of phantasy on which attention was fixed, but still present to sense. It is otherwise in vision. I will add three obscrvations which are to some extent conjectural. In Book IX of The Excursion, Wordsworth puts into the mouth of the Pastor a vivid description of the ghastly Druid rites which might have been witnessed in old timc by thc Valc which is now a home of Christian peace. The picture which the Pastor conjurcs up is in substance identical with part of Wordsworth's account of his own severic on Salisbury Plain. It is very improbable that Wordsworth had another such experience in the Lake District; in all likclihood ho As I roas Going doron Sackzille Street, p. 193.

·1 DREAM, HALLUCINATION, REVERIE, VISION 45 has simply recalled the unique experience on Salisbury Piain, and transferred it quite legitimately for his purpose to his own dcar native regions," on the strength of "A few rude monuments of mountain-stone," which survived there and serc believed on what authority I know not) to be of Druidical origin. It may be a mere fancy on my part, but I find something significant in the fact that these prolonged reveries on the banks of the Loire and on Salisbury Plain belong to a period in Wordsworth's life when his higher imagination, his "visionary power," was for a time impaired. I find a similar significance in the fact that in larer life, when his visionary poker had certainly failed, and he was less en rapport with Nature, by which alone that power was stimulated, he again grew fond of such day-dreaming, " Pleased rather with some soft ideal scene, The work of Tancy," than with the fair region that lay around him. The sonnet that contains these lines belongs to 1833: IV. Vision. When I come to the subject of vision, and so touch the deepest stratum of Wordsworth's genius, such confidence is I feel comes largely from the fact that here I can lean on the most understanding of Wordsworth's critics. I could wish the paragraphs that follow to be read as so many footnotes to A. C. Bradley's Oxford Lecture on Wordsworth. Vision is ncither dream, nor hallucination, nor reverie. These are all subjective states, mere phantasies of our own creation, which bring us no knokledge of anything beyond us: in vision se perceive somcihing not ourselves. So much all visionaries affirm; but when se press for a more positive account of their experience they fall back on metaphor. In vision, they tell us, momentary transparency comes over the extemal sorld, revealing its inner constitution. Or the senses, they say, ·STUDY OF WORDSWORTH arc laid asleep, and we see into the life of things; as if, there being in ordinary perception four terms--soul : sense: nature: reality-in vision the middlc terms are for a moment cancelled, and the extremes communicate directly. Or again, the world, they tell us, scems to melt into the soul, to become a dream, a prospect in the mind, as if all things were within the self. These are all attempts to express in terms of the logical understanding an experience that passes understanding. The last, which is Wordsworth's own, emphasizes the resemblance between vision and dream, and at once raises the question, "Is vision then illusory? Or is Nature itself an illusion ?" Coleridge would have accepted the former conclusion and Blake the latter ; but Wordsworth will not agree cither, with Coleridge, that Nature lives only in our life, or, with Blakc, that Nature is the work of the devil. No doubt, he will say, vision is in part creation ; but in part it is perception also. Nature is in a scnse appearance, since it is not the ultimate reality; but it is not illusion, for the reality revealed in vision is its reality or indwelling spirit, as it is the inclwelling spirit of the percciving mind. In vision the human intellcct is wedeled to this goodly universe in love and holy passion. But thesc waters are too deep for me, I return thankfully to the dry ground of observable fact, The first thing to be observed is the connection, whatever its nature, between Wordsworth's visionary power and two peculiarities of his mental constitution on which I have alrcady dwelmhis sensitiveness to impressions beyond the range of normal cycs and cars, and those strange trances in which he grasped some solid object to save himself from falling into "the abyss of ilealism." “At that time," lic told Miss Fixiwick, "I was afraid of these processes." In 7lic Prelude, however, he speaks of moments when the light of sense Gors out, but with a flash that has recalcd The invisible world." A ·DREAM, HALLUCINATION, REVERIE, VISION 45 May we infer that in these boyish trances-for they scam all to bclong to his schooldays-there was as yet no revealing flash? That the boy felt only that the light of sense was going out, and was afraid?' It is recorded of some Christian mystics that they attained to the Beatific Vision by purcly inward mcditation, unaided cven by symbols, on the person and attributes of Christ. Wordsworth's visions were not of this purely inward origin. Though they transcended sense, they seem always to have been occasioned by some natural sight or sound, more often by sight than by sound, and in their purest forn by sight alonc. In the Wanderer's ecstasy ** sound needed none, Nor any vicc of jos." lle stood in the presence of the cternil silence. "In their purest fonin," I have said; for there are degrees in vision. At its highest it is direct perception of eternal reality, the distinctive mystical experience which is called ccstasy. This is the "screnc and blessed mood" of Tintern Ahbey, the "high hour of visitation from the living God" of The Excursion. (The more theological expression bclonga, it tsill be notcd, to the later poem) But there arc degrees of vision that come short of ecstasy: The poem To the Cuckoo is visionary throughout; but it is not costatic, it has no religious implication And other poems, not visionary throughout, contain visionary passages, such as the magical close of Lucy Gray. I have thought to sec a touch of vision even in so plat a calc 35 Alice Fell; in another equally matter-of-fact pocin, The Sailor's Mother, there is inore than a touch of it, as ts shown by the line "When from these lofty thoughts I woke." It is in Wordsworth's most characteristic poems-I (la not say his best, but his most characterstic pocin, those that we feel no one else could have written that ·& STUDY OF WORDSIVORTH such visionary passages are most apt to occur. There is one scction of his work in every pocm of which this visionary quality is present in somc degree, though I admit that it grows very faint in the poems of later datc, is there (so to say) rather in intention than in fact. And because of the presence of this visionary quality Wordsworth cntitled this section Poems of the Imagination. Imagination without vision is Fancy. As vision may vary in degree so may it be accompanicd with varictics of cmotional tonc. With ecstasy there is rapture, in which thought itself expires in enjoyment." ." The tone of the pocm To the Cuckoo, though not rapturous, is wholly pleasurable. But often thic onset of the visionary cxpcrience is accompanied with disturbance or trouble "A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of clcvated thoughts ; " While he was talking thus, the lonely place, *I'lıc old Alan's shape, and speech-all trouhlcd nic." There is always some preparation for vision in the previous mood or thought of the visionary; and to this, I belicvc, it owes its varicty of degree and emotional tonc. Ecstatic vision is possible only to an cyc "inadç quict by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy."

·DREAM, TALLUCINATION, REVERIE, VISION 45 Of visions supervening on moods of surcharged emotion there are two instances in Book XII of The Prelude. The first of these was the occasion alrcady Inentioned, when, having lost his escort on the moot, he stumbled on a "bottom" where once a murderer had been hung in chains: his name could still be read cut in the turf at the foot of the mouldered gibbet.' On the second occasion, feverish with longing for home and holidays, he had wandered out alone to watch for the ponics that were to take him and his brothers home. Herc the visionary mood, as recalled, clearly took some of its tone from retrospect; for within ten days of that homecoming his father died, and the boy fooked on that loss as a chastisement for his wicked impaticnce. The significant thing about these two visions is that in both the boy was confronted, in the first immcdiatcly, in the second retrospectively, with the fact of death, which made the world of scnsc unreal. Of conditions favourable to vision the most important was solitude, I will not labout a point which Bradley has made so convincingly, but content myself with two obscrvations. So important was solitude for the cvocation of the visionary mood in Wordsworth, that tslien it did not exist in the original circumstances he was somctimes constrained to create it. The familiar poem on the Daffodils provides a neat instance, When Wordsworth actually saw those daffodils fluttering and dancing in the breczc beside Ullswater he was with his sister Dorothy, But apparently he could not poctize the scene until he had imagined himself alone with it. Hence the characteristic opening "I wandered lonely as a cloud." Another, and a more striking, instance of the same thing is sccn, as I have tried to show, in Resolution and Independence, where the loneliness of the scene is more "So Wordsworth tay, in fact the name as that of the murdered man ·i STUDY OF WORDSWORTIL strongly emphasized, and the visionary character of the experience made more apparent. Solitude is most casily found on moors and mountains, and most of Wordsworth's visions accordingly have a mountain or moorland setting. But not all. He could make an island of solitude for himself even in the midst of crowds: witness his London visions. There is his vision of the blind man in a London street, propped against a wall with a placard on his breast, at the sight of whom the poet's mind turnel round "as with the might of waters," and he siood gazing on that steadfast, sightless face, admonished from another world." 1 There is the picture, touchingly hum:n vet visionary too, of the working man who had snatched a few minutes from his toil to sit beside the park railings with his sickly infant in his arms, bending over it as if to shield it from sun and air, and cyeing it " with love unuttcrable." And there were other moments in London when the crowds in the overflowing strects melted into as if "..second-sight procession, such as glides Over still mununtains, or appears in dreams." Recollections of such moments inspired The Reucric of Poor Susan, where the song of the caged thrush lifts the cxilc's heart for a little to heaven :- "Tis a note of enchantment; what ails her? She sees e mountain ascending, a vision of trees; Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glick, and a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside." Heaven lies about us in our infancy” is the central theme of the Immortality Ode; yet Wordsworth nowhere records any special visionary experience from the days of his carly childhood, of which indeed he has prescrved So in Resolution and Independence : " Or like a man from sonic far region sent, To give me human strength, by apt admonishment."

·DREUSI, HALLUCIXATIOX, REVERIE VISION 4; very for recollections. It is true that in 184; he spoke to liss Fenwiel: as if the lines referred to this period, but the errorienes uhich best answer to these lines belonged, as we have seen, to his tenth year. In boyhood, properly so called, when Nature was his playground, such crpcriences secon to have befallen him only when his mind was sensitizaui by conscious guilt, terror, or leverish expectation. In adolescence . Wature became all in all to him; the years of adolescence seemed to him in retrospect to have been years of continuous exaltation ; but it is impossible to frame a chronology of his visionary experiences luctuern boyhood and manhooi, or to say at what point in his glad youth he came to read a deeper meaning into them. The first clear evidence of such awareness occurs in his joumal letter to Dorothy describing liis Swiss tour in the autumn of 1790:-" Imong the more au ful scenes of the Alps"--morc auful, that is, by contrast with the scenery round lake Como-" I had not a thought of man, or a single created being, my whole soul was turned to him who proxluced the terrible majesty before me a sentence which contains the germ of the sublimest passage in The Prelude In the turmoil of sesual and political passion that tilled his mind during lus residence in France and for a year or two thereafter, his visionary power was in alxevance, or at most was only fitfully recoi cred. When lie had settled at Racedown with Dorothy : 2795. the favor left him ; he once more smelt the dew and rain, and began to recall and recapture the lugh beatitude of youth: among the runs of lus roolutionary liopes he sought again the springs of his old happiness and found them still flowing. But if Dorothy gare him eies and cars, it as the influence of Coleridge's most metaphysical mind that nou la him, I believc, to think these yorithful ·48 A STUDY OF WORDSWORTH experiences together, and seek in them a clue to the riddle of this painful carth. Alas! his second spring was short. Already in Book XII of The Prelude he is saying "I see by glimpses now; wlicn age comes on, May scarcely sce at all." In the Immortality Ode the radiance has been taken from his sight for ever. But the memory of it remained, to fortify the faith that looks through death. The carly decay of Wordsworth's visionary power may be connected with the fact that he was not, in the strict sense, a religious but a natural mystic. If its clocation depended always on some sense-stimulus, it would be more and more rarely evoked as his organic sensibility diminished with the approach of middle age. Its decay was not immediately followed by any gencral decline in his poctic powers. Other sources of inspiration remained, some of which did not altogether ccase to flow cren when he grew old. But though he continued to produce nature-poeins, one tour after another yielding its sheaf of " Memorials," something was gone which had made the nature-poçtry of his prime unique.

·CHLAMTER Y THEORY OF POETRY WordswOATII did not think highly of literary criticism, esen his own, and in his old age 125 inclined to blame Coleridge for pushing him into it. Is it ungenerous to suggest that this disparagement of his onn critical efforts masks a silent withdrawal from positions which Coleridge's later criticisms had shown to be untenable? A poct may very ucll be a critic too; indeed all the best criticism of poetry in English has come from pocts, Doubtless Wordsworth the port means far morc to us than Wordsworth the cntic ; but there an be no doubt either that his thcon effectively helped his practice to tum the current of English poetry into the channel in which it flowed till the other day. Judgment of Wordsworth's thcon of priciny has been a good deal distorted by the cxcessaic emphasis laid on his polemic against poctic diction. For this he largely has himself to blame; but the responsibility must be shared to some extent by Coleridge, whose criticism of Wordsworth's theories in the Bingraphia Literaria dwelt too exclusn ely on his viesus on pocric diction. I hope to show that these yies are not in truth the essence of Wordsu orth's theon of poetry, but rather what logicians all an inseparable accident. adhering to his theory rather than inherent in it, and adhering most closely at a particular stage in the development of his social and political opinions--the stage, I mean, which he had reached when he wrote the Advertisement to the first edition of the Lyrical Ballads in 1798 and the l'reface to the second and third editions of 1800 and 1802. It is in these, and especially in the Preface of 1802, with its large and important additions to the 1800 Preface, that we find the only sustained exposition of Wordsworth's general theory of 07 ·50 A STUDY OF WORDSWORTH ($ 86 poetry. The Fenwick notes deal mostly with particular poems, and the Essays of 1815 are little to our present purpose, being devoted chiefly, the first of them to an attempt to show that other great poets as well as he had been neglected in their own day, the second to explaining the arrangement of his poems and the difference between Poems of the Fancy" and Poems of the Imagination.' Taking the 1802 Preface, then, as the most authoritartive exposition of Wordsworth's poetic crecd, we find that the essence of it lics not in his polemic against poetic diction, but in his conception of the origin, nature, and purpose of poctry, and of the function of the poet in a civil society. "Poctry is the spontancous overflow of powerful feelings"-that is his fundamental position. Biodernist critics have assailed it with scorn: poctry, they tell us, is an art, not a dumping ground for emotion. Words Wordsworth might have rejoined that the implied antithesis between art and cmotion is false, that emotionless art is a contradiction in tornis. But I am concerned not to defend Wordsworth's position but to stato it, and the sentence which I have quoted is the first article of his creed. Now feeling commonly tends to express itself in spcech or action : "Anger in hasty words or blow's Itself discharges on its focs." But the poct's feelings do not “discharge " themselves in this way. The poet, as poet, does not react to an impression immediately; he allows it to sink into his mind along with the feelings which it has excited : there it remains till its accidental ingredients have been, so to speak, precipitated, and what is left is its ideal or essential truth. When, later, the impression, thus purged of accidents, is recallcd, the original feeling, similarly purged, revives with it. This is what Wordsworth means when he says that poetry takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity. He does not ·THEORY OF MOETRY SI man, as is sometimes supposed, that the poce remembers in cold blood an experience which had moved him in the past. No: in the poet's mind the cmotion which accompanied the original impression revives when the impression is recalled. There is nothing exceptional in this experience; all sensitive and imaginative people have had it in some degrec. "1 can remember pain, anger, spiritual cxaltation, cmbarrassment, and fccl them again almost as powerfully as at the first impact," say's Jr James Bridic. The ability thus to reconstruct an emotion, as Sir Bridie phrases it. belongs in an eminent degree in the power, being in fact a portion of his native endowment, his more than usual organic sensibility:" As he krites, inc poct lives through the whole crperience again in an idealized form; and the reader of poetry in tum, so far as he muy, Inex through this secondary experience of the poet's as hc ruds. 'i'he pact, then, is a sin endowed with a "more than usual capacity to perceive and focl, and to revive his perceptions and reclings in the absence of their objects: to be a great poci, let us adj, hic must have thought long and deeply. In all this he differs from his fellos -men only in detec: all men are able to perceive, fccl, and think in some mcasure, and many are able csen in imunine : "Oh' many are the picts that are worn By Sacure, men en Joued with highest gifts, "I ne suon and the faculty dirine. Yet anrin: tlx sccomplishment of the " It is this last gift, the accomplishment of crse, that distinguishes the articuluie poct from other natures, even from other poctiv nututes The post an cornmunicate hus experiences, and communicate them in such a way as to give pleasure So much for the ongn of poetry Its nature will appar more clearly when we haie considered its ord or ·A STUDY OF WORDSWORTH purpose, and the means thereto, or, what comes to the same thing, the function of the poet in a civil society. Wordsworth felt as strongly as Kcats that there is no Horthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good for the world. He hoped that his poems would operate in thcir degree to cxtend the domain of sensibility for the delight, the honour, and the bencfit of human nature. He trusted that it was their destiny to console thc afflicted; to add sunshine to daylight, by making the happy happier; to Icad the young and the gracious of every age to scc, to think, and to feel, and thereforc, to become more actively and securely virtuous. Such is the poet's office, and there is nonc morc cxalted. Wordsworth scorns people who talk of a taste for poetry, as if it were a thing as indifferent as a taste for rope-dancing or Frontiniac or sherry. Poctry is not a mere entertainment, a diversion for a patron's idle hours. It is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge, the impassioned expression that is in the countenance of all science. To be incapable of a feeling for poetry, in the true sense of the word, is to be without love of human nature and reverence for God. The poet is a saccr vates, a prophet, whosc mission it is to amuse the sensual from their sleep Of Death, and win thc vacant and the vain To noble raptures.' This passionate assertion of the value of poctry for life is the heart of Wordsworth's doctrinc. ✓ If poetry is "the breath and finer spirit of all knowicdgc," there can be no real hostility between poctry and science. It is truc that in the mood of 1798, when he had Aung away from Godwinism and was cxalting feeling above cold logic, Wordsworth poured scorn on the minute philosopher who would peep and botanize upon his mother's grave. But what he scorned was the "false secondary power" of analysis divorced from feeling, which had usurped the name of Reason. For true science, the reverent and imaginative scarch for truth, he had nothing but admiration. (If there was one IS ·THEORY OF POLTRY 53 inan among his contemporaries to whom he looked ur, it was Sir Ilumphry Daiy.) So much is indccui apparent in the sentence which I have quoted from the Prolace of 1802; but many years later Wordsworth stated his considered vicw expressly: "Admiration and love." he said, " to which ait knowledge truly vital must tend, arc fcit by men of real genius in proportion as their discovcrics in Natural Philosophy arc enlarged; and the beauty in form of a plant or an animal is not made less but more apparent as a whole by a morc accurate insight into its constituent properties and powers. A Savant, who is not also a poet and a rcligionist at lcart, is a fccble and unhappy crcaturc," ! Still, the poct is not a min of science; his immciliste object is not knowledge but pleasure; he writes for all men, not for specialists only, and asks no knowledge from lus readers beyond what they possess not as chemists or botanists but as inen. Neither is he 3 min of action. The poct dous gend for the world not by adding to men's Inowledge or their comforts but by extending the range of human sensibility. In Wordsworth's views, as was pointed out in Chapter 1, infant sensibility is the " great birthright of our being"; but in most of us it is gradually orcrisid by a wcight of custom or choked by the cares of the world; the film of familianty dims our eyes to the divine beauty and mystery of Nature, and the lapse of years makes our hearis slon to feel and resigns them "To selfishness and cold obln sous carts"? It is the poet's office to break through this chist of custom, remove this film of fainzhanty, and soften these hardened hearts, in a word, to do for mankind what Wordsworth says that his sister did for him " She gave me eyes, she gave me cars, And humble ares and delicate (cars, heart, the fountain of sweet cars Ind lose, and lege, and in See the l'ennich note on This L, carni alfar • The Old Cwnlvoland Berpat, 1 95 ·5+ A STUDY OF WORDSWORTH And this the poet can do because he has retained and augmented his native sensibility, and by his accomplishment of verse has power to make us see the world and our fellowinen through his eyes. No poct has described the poct's truc function more admirably than Mr de la Mare :--"Burdened with the complexity of the lives we lend, fretting over appearances, netted in with anxieties and apprehensions, half smothered in drift of tepid thoughts and lepid feelings, we may refuse what poetry has to give; but under its influence serenity returns to the troubled mind, the world crumbles, loveliness shincs like flowers after rain, and the further reality is once more charged with mystery. If these are in truth the cardinal articles of Wordswortli's creed, why, it will lic asked, has hic laid such stress on poetic diction that it has commonly been taken to be the main theme of his prose Prefaces ? For answer we must look at the dates of the first three editions of the Lyrical Ballads-1798, 1800, 1802. In 1798 Wordsworth's Revolutionary hopes were shattered by the French invasion of Switzerland, and for a time lic turned away from politics. In So2 his visit to Calais opened his eyes to the national danger, and he threw himself into the impending struggle against Napolcon. Between these clates, as I have said, he turned away from practical politics; but his democratic sympathics were still strong, and, balked in the sphere of action, they sought expression in poctry. At the heart of the democratic creed is the conviction that the things which men have in common are more important than those in which they differ : most important of all are those primary instincts and affections which belong to men as men, instincts and affections which by this time Wordsworth had come to regard as the deepest and most authoritative clcmcnts in human nature and those on which human happiness chicfly iefly depends, These things, then, in Wordsworth's view, were the best themes for poelry; and they were to be seen, he believal, in their purest form, and found their most ·THEORY OF POCTRY SS “Now natural expression, among simple country folk such as he had known in his boyhood. Even in 1798 Wordsworth would not have denied that "Ilcants as pure and fair May beat in Belgrase Square As in the loss lier air Of Seicn Dials.” But he believed that such hearts were few, and that ninctcon-twentieths of those who enjoy or scek consideration in Society were incapable of love to man or revcrcncc for God." He was not alone in this opinion at that time. Not to speak of Rousscau and his condemnation of French Sociсty, the Cambridge Evangelical, Isaac Milner, had written in 1794: in general the lower classes only regard such things -i.c. the Gospel-"and the great and high have, all over Europe, forgotten that they have souls. Wordsworth would not write to amuse a Sociсty so decply corrupted, nor cmploy its language: he would pipe a simpic song for thinking hearts in language that cottagers and children could understand. The Lyrical Ballads of 1798 were put forward as an experiment, "with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of sucicy is adapted to the purposes of poctic plc.asure In the Preface of 1800 hc defined bus purpose morc fully and carefully, and replaced the unfortunate phrase about "conversation in the middle and lower classes " by "a sclection of language rcally used by men." llad he been content with this amended statement, and continued to call his Ballads an experto mnent, his manifesto would have been hard to challenge. But opposition and ridicule had stiffened bus attitude. Gry had once asserted that the language of the age is never the language of poetry, except among the French. To controvert this it would h.11c sufficed to point out that in English also sonic good poetry does not differ in diction from good prosc. But this was not enough ·50 STUDY OF WORDSIVORTH for Wordsworth. “We will go further," he says. It may ise safely affirmed that there neither is, nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose and mctrical composition.' By going so far he took up a position which Coleridge found it casy to outflank. Coleridge's criticisms are too well known to need restatcment. It will be more profitable to salvage such portions of Wordsworth's doctrine as are true and valid, in spite of the provocative form into which his democratic bias made him cast them. No such bias influenced his analysis of the origin and nature of "so-called poctic diction," which is entirely convincing except when he deals with metre. Wordsworth was not the first English poet, nor the lası, to revolt against an established poctic tradition. Donne revolted against the Petrarchan convention in love-poctry; and Pope against the conceits of the Metaphysicals ; in our own day Kipling and Ycats rebelled against Tennysonianism, and modernist poetry arosc in a revolt against the Georgians. The particular tradition against which Wordsworth revolted was that of the later Augustans, to which he had himself been enslaved when he wrote An Esening Ilalk. All these innovators, even Pope himself, regarded their revolt as a Return to Nature. How do such litcrary conventions arise? The carliest pocts of all nations, says Wordsworth, wrote in a glow of feeling, and threw out daring, figurativc expressions such as strong focling spontancously inspires. Their successors and imitators, finding such language consecrated, as it were, to poctry, used it in cold blood, hoping thereby to excitc in their hearers or readers emotions which they did not feel themselves. In this process the language of poetry lost the image and superscription which the original poets had stamped on it. Wordsworth sought to reinint this outworn coinage in the fire of his own heart and temper it afresh in the stream of living specch. His “experiment” succeeded occasionally cren in the first volume of the Lyrical Ballads, frequently and triumphantly in the second, ·THEORY OF POETRY 57 Verse. which contains four of the "Lucy" poems, Poor Susan, Lucy Gray, The Teco April Mornings, and The Fountain -masterpieces of a serious simplicity unique in English Wordsworth did not repeat his experiment on any large scale. Having shot his bolt in the Lyrical Ballads, he returned to the statelier style which was natural to him, and which even in 1798 he had used with noble cffcct in Tintern Abbey. W. P. Ker was of opinion that the difference in style between the 1802 volume and the 1807 volume was due to the fact that in the interval Wordsworth, who had long been familiar with Spenser, Shakespcare, and Milton, became acquainted, or better acquainted, with Chaucer, Sidney, Drayton, and Daniel. In 1843 he told Miss Fenwick that'he first became familiar with Chaucer, Drayton, and Daniel through Anderson's Corpus of the British Poets, which his brother John gave him when he visited Grasmere in 1800. Wordsworth's recollection was not quite right as regards Chaucer : he had known something of Chaucer in Cambridge days, when he laughed with him in the hawthorn shade beside the mill at Trumpington; but it was in 1801 that his modernizations of Chaucer were written, and some of the 1807 poems, notably The Happy Warrior, do recall well-languaged Danicl, whose middle style" appealed to him and from whom he quotes a whole stanza in The Excursion. So far we may agree with W. P. Ker. But Wordsworth's most striking innovation in these years was his adoption of the sonnet form, in shich he was to achieve some of his grcatest successes. This innovation occurred to him one day in 1802, when Dorothy read him the whole of Milton's sonncts. The great series On National Liberty and Independence is Miltonic in form and spirit. The growing influence of Milton, obvious in the later states" of The Prelude, may be detected even in the later books of the first " state," which was finished in 1805. Next to Milton, the poet to whom he was most akin 19 not Shakespeare or Chaucer, but Spenser.

·58 A STUDY OF WORDSWORTH The lovely poem called A Farewell, written in the summer of 1802, is bcautifully Spenserian in movement and sentiment; indeed, he calls it "a Spenserian poem." But to return to the Lyrical Ballads. The corruption of politc Society made Wordsworth choose his subjccts from humble life. In choosing them from rustic rather than urban life he was influenced, no doubt, by the fact that he himself was country-bred ; but the reasons that he gives for his choice are quite impersonal. He knew well enough that the country hold gipsies and beggars as degraded as the dwellers in city slums, and loutish plough-boys lithic higher in the scale of ſccling than the beasts they drovc; but it was not among these that he looked for his subjects, Tis Michael is a peasant proprietor, and the Ewbank brothers, though fallen in the world, belong by birth to the same class, the class which had composed the "almost visionary mountain rcpublic" of the Dales in his bovhood. When we remembcr this we shall find some truth in his claim that among such people the essential passions of the heart find a better soil to mature in, are more easily comprehended and more durable, are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of Nature and expressed in the simple language which hourly communication with Nature tcaches Wordsworth would scarcely have maintained that the paternal and fraternal instincts are stronger in the country than in the town. But family affection contains other strands besides merc instinct there is the closer intimacy which isolation forces on rural houscholds there is the sharing of common tasks, and even, in the shepherd's life, of common dangers; inwound with instinct these make a triple cord that is not easily broken. We must add yet another strand, the decpscated love of the small hereditary farm, on which he had toiled for seventy years that he might hand it on to his son free as he had received it from his father we must add this, I say, before we can fully comprehend ·'THCORY or iOETRY 52 the tragic strength of the love that binds Michael to Luke. "Other virtues too-contentment, neighbourlincss, charity--could flourishi in the kindly society of the Dales, where Labour still worc a rosy face, where the labourer *3s still a free man, and clicte penury and hunger's abject wretchedness, "Mortal to trendy, and the leasinon mind." were still unknown. Again, the love of Nature, if not itself one of the csscntial passions of the heart, may be so entwined with them from the associations of childhood that it at once strengthens and is hallowed by them. Leonard Exbank could not see the familiar böcks of Ennerdale without rememlering how he had carried his brother through them on his back; and at the heart of poor Susan's ision of mountain and dale is "a ungle small cottage, a nast like a duse's. 'I The one only duelling on carth that she donna" The effect of such associations on language is more questionable. In the growth of language social environment counts for more than natural surroundings. The stately specch" which "grave livers do in Scotland use over much less to Scottish scenery than to the English Bible. Yet I believe that it does one something; Having known slum chuldren in Glasgow who reached school age with no word for "sky" or "clouds" but "reck," I cannot but think that cien in the matter of language the country-bred chuli, other things being equal, has a fairer seed-time for his soul. There is something, then, to be said for all or mert of Wordsworth's original contentions ; frut when he grocs funher and maintains that there is no essential difference between the language of food prose and that of metrial composition, advocacy becomes less easy. lle persists in regardinç metre as something "adren. (the word is his own), a kind of polish or varnish applied to the surface of poetry, int not an titious ·STUDY OF WORDSWORTH essential part of its substance. He actually conjectures that the earliest poets may not have used metre at all, that it was a later embellishment, an after-thought; and if asked why, holding such views, he did not write in prose, would have replied in cffect that, since he possessed" the accomplishment of verse," there was no reason why he should not give his readers this additional pleasure. He recognizes the power of metre to regulate or control emotion, and remarks (as his bête noirc Hume had remarked before him) that by administering small shocks of expected pleasure at regular intervals it makes us able to endure, and even in a sense to enjoy, things in verse that would be too painful in prosc. But he never inquires how metre originates, or, what comes to the same thing, how metre and diction are related in poetry. Had he donc so, it might have occurred to him that the recurrences which regulate or control cmotion are themselves a product of emotion. Consider the famous stanza in which the leech-gatherer is compared to a "travelled " houlder, and that in turn to a basking seal. These similes would be as grotesquc in prosc as some of the words and constructions in which they are expressed would be unnatural. But in verse they are entirely right, because all of themmfigures, words, and constructions are generated by the same exalted mood as generates, and is signified by, the metre. It is hard to say how far this heresy of Wordsworth's was a corollary of his general theory of poetic diction, and how far it was due to the limitations of his car. I mean his car for verse: that he had a poor car for inusic is of no consequence in this connection- Tennyson and Swinburne are reckoned melodious ports, though both were tone-deaf. Fordsworth's car for versc was not bad, like Byron's, but it was finical rather than fine: we learn from Leigh Hunt, for instance, that he objected to the similar endings in Shakespeare's line about the bees 'The singing inasons building soofs of gold ·121EORY OF POETRY 61 a repetition is hich keats sith surer instinct felt to be in harmony with the continued note of the singers. There are many memorable lines in Wordsworth, but none that we rememher for the mere heauty of its sound, as we remember Shakespeare's "Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang." or Wilton's "To save the Athenian walls from tuin bare." llad Wordsworth's feeling for the sound of words been as delicatc as his feeling for their sense, he might have donc for the metres of Englislı pocery what he did for its diction, and freshened their jaded rhythms with new cadences caught from the living roice." As it was, his mctrical innovations were few and unsuccessful; for the most part he stuck to accepied mcasures, and moved most casily when he moved in the strictess bonds, in the sonnet's narros room of the firm frams of the regular odc. Sowcver we may account for his views on metro, it is clear enough that some of lordssorth's failurcs--- when he did fail-were duc to a too rigid adherence to his thcorics. llc was misled to some extent by the clampic of Burns. It was Bums, he tells us, who had shown him "llox Verse may build a princely throne On humble truth" But Burns had advantages denied 0 Wordsworth. When he wanted to go bchind the Augustan tradition of English poetry he could f31l bach, both for diction and for mcire, on a native Scottish tradition conturirs old. IIc may have stiffened his diction with some strands of homespun Westland dialect, but the staple of it is traditional literary Scots; his metres xx* are all traditional, even the one that bears his nime, English, Wordsworth ſound no model for popular poetry except the ballad, and csen among ballads his ·A STUDY OF WORDSWORTH essential part of its substance. He actually conjectures that the carliest poets may not have used metre at all, that it was a later embellishment, an after-thought; and if asked why, holding such views, he did not pyrite in prose, would have replied in cffect that, since he possessed" the accomplishment of verse," there was no reason why he should not give his readers this additional pleasure. He recognizes the power of metre to regulate or control emotion, and remarks (as his béte noire Humc had remarked before him) that by administering small shocks of expected pleasure at regular intervals it makes us able to cndure, and even in a sense to enjoy, things in versc that would be too painful in prosc. But he never inquires how metre originates, or, what comes to the same thing, how metre and diction are related in poetry. Had he donc so, it might have occurred to him that the recurrences which regulate or control cmotion are themselves a product of cmotion. Consider the famous stanza in which the lecch-gatherer is compared to a “travcllcd boulder, and that in turn to a basking scal. These similes would be as grotesque in prosc as some of the words and constructions in which they are expressed would be unnatural. But in verse they are entirely right, because all of them--figures, words, and constructions-are generated by the same exalted mood as generates, and is signified by, the metrc. It is hard to say how far this heresy of Wordsworth's was a corollary of his general thcory of poctic diction, and how far it was due to the limitations of his car. mean his car for verse: that he had a poor car for inusic is of no consequence in this connection--- Tennyson and Swinburne are reckoned melodious poets, though both were tone-deaf. Wordsworth's car for versc was not bad, like Byron's, but it was finical rather than fine: we learn from Leigh Hunt, for instance, that he objected to the similar endings in Shakespeare's linc about the bees--- "The singing masons building roofs of gold".

·THEORY OF POETRY 61 a repetition which keats with surcr instinct felt to be in farmony with the continued note of the singers. There are many mainorablc lines in Wordsworth, but none that we remember for the mere beauty of its sound, as uc remember Shakespcare's "Nare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang." or Vilton's "To save the Athenian walls from tuin barc." Ilad Wordsworth's feeling for the sound of words been as delicate as his fccling for their sense, he might have donc for the metres of English poctry what he did for its diction, and freshened their jaded rhythms with ncw cadences caught from the living voice. As it was, his mctrical innovations were few and unsuccessful: for the most part hc stuck to accepted measures, and moved most casily when hc moved in the strictest bonds, in the sonnet's narrow room or the firm frame of the regular odc. However we may account for his views on metrc, it is clear cnough that some of Wordsworth's failureswhen he did fail-werc duc to a too rigid adherence to his thcorics. Hic was misled to some cxtcnt by the cxample of Bums. It was Burns, he tells us, who had shown him "flow Verse may build a princely throne On humble truth" But Burns had advantages denied to Wordsworth. When he wanted to go behind the Augustan tradition of English poctry he could fall back, both for diction and for metre, on a native Scottish tradition centuries old. Hic inay have stiffened his diction with some strands of homespun Westland dialect, but the stapic of it is traditional literary Scots; his metres too are all traditional, men the one that bears his name. In English, Wordsworth found no model for popular poctry ercept the ballad, and even among ballads his ·62 A STUDY OF WORDSWORTH choice was limited. The grand old ballads of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries would not serve his purpose, with their chivalric themes and archaic diction, so that he was reduced to the humdruin broadside ballad of which The Babes in the Wood is a not unfavourable specimen. The occasional fatness of the Lyrical Ballads in style and rhythm may be blamed on these poor models. Most of his failures, however, were duc less to theoretical crrors than to defects of temperament. It is not quite true to say that Wordsworth had no sense of humour: he could apply with gusto to a drunken but avaricious curate the jibe that he could take any given quantity”; he could cvcn joke about his own habit of "booing on the public roads." He never resented a jest at his own expensc," says Aubrey dc V'crc, and goes on to tell how heartily he laughed when, after they had knocked three times in vain at the door of a London house, de Verc exclaimed, "Dear God! the very houses seem asleep." Still, his sense of humour was admittedly not lively, and he was himself aware that things might sound ludicrous to others which did not sound ludicrous to him. This lack of humour-say rather, this stiffness in the risible faculty-betrays him sometimes into childishness like that of the lines And still, the more he works, the more Do his wcak ankles swell"-- which spoil the affecting story of Simon Lec; sometimes into grandiloquence, as which he calls a stage-coach" an itinerant vehiclc," or a kilt a "plaided vest," or an expectant mother "the thankful captive of maternal bonus "phrases indistinguishable from the "so-called poetic diction " which he had so vigorously denounced. 'The tone of the context generally makes it casy to clistinguish such unconscious pomposities from the dcliberate mock-heroic of "And nt thc Iloop nlighted, famous inn."

·THEORY OF POITRY The other side of this humorlessness is the lule jocosity which disconcerts us in The Idiot Boy that pocm Wordswonh said, "In truth, I never anything with more glee"; and what I have calle jocosity, evidently comics from his efforts to convey vice to liis readers. We know from his litic John Wilson that he regardal idiots as beingy u lirc is "hidden with God," and looked on the cond or poor parents towards thesc afflicted children as greatest iriumph of the human heart. But such son ments do noi malc for glee. That comes froin Word orth's sense of the capacity of this particular idiot fe joy, a capacity which shares the nature of infinity. All that night, so harrowing to Betty and Susan, Jolinn: lad sat on his pony lclore the waterfall, enrapture with the moonshine and the hooting of the ouds. "7%, cocks did cros to-whow), to-nhon. And the sun did shine so cold these words, reported to Wordsworth by luis friend Poole, were the foundation of the whole poem, and the thought of this rapture, though not reicaled till the end, irradiates the poci's mind throughout like thic moon bchind a cloud. Once or twice the punty of Wordsworthi's poetic mouve seems to be alloyed with a bascr clement, a tracc of what onc rust call arrogance 'The Prologue to Peter Bell offends us with its arrogant multu, " Brutus will start a spirit as soon as Caesar, proclaimung. as it cre, the author's intention to show us how he would have written The Ancient Mariner The austerity of the Il'hite Dor of Rylstone, iis dchilxcratc avoidance of outward action, seems to copy a tacit chuke to the stirring Juthor of The lay of the last Hlinstrel. (.Vert year Wordsworth acknou faired the cccipt of Warmion with the chulling remark: “I think our cnd has been attaincu That it is not in cien espect the end which I should wish you to propuxo yourscif, you will be well aware") 'Pe Il'hire Bor ·say it in. 64 A STUDY OF WORDSWORTH remains a wonderful poem ; but what are we to say of Ellen Ircin, that hapless travesty of Helen of Kirkconnch, for which the hardiest Wordsworthian must blush ? Two defects remain in which theory and temperament scem to conspire. The first is a tendency to didacticism. \crescnt poetry which, in Kcats's phrasc, " has a design upon us. Wordsworth once told Lady Beaumont that he wished to be regarded as a teacher or as nothing. A natural wish in a dedicated spirit, but its insistence sometimes made him forget Dryden's golden maxim, a maxim which he accepted in theory, that Poesy only instructs as it delights. This tendency grew on him in and after The Excursion. His poetic fire was dying down, but he still had much of value to say, and used his proved accomplishment of verse to Akin to this defect is another which may be illustratcd best from Peter Bell. That poem, though written in 1798, was withheld from publication till 1819, largely in deference to Charles Lamb's judgment. Now Lamb knew poctry when he saw it, and we shall understand and share his objections if, after reading 11. Legouis's summary, we turn back at once to the For we shall discover to our surprise that, except for one or two small patches of pure poetry, Wordsworth's verse is actually less interesting than M. Legouis's prose. The conclusion is obvious: the real interest of Peter Bell is not poctical at all; it is psychological.? Like Mr Mascfield's The Everlasting Micrcy, Peter Bell is a study in the psychology of religious conversion. As such it is highly interesting and illuminating It tells how the hardened crust of Pcter's brutal nature is broken through and his heart made contrite by the cumulative effect, stroke after stroke, of a series of natural happenings which his superstitious mind interprets supernaturally. Words- ! Coleridge did not fall into this error. Or The Three Grates he wrote: It is not presented as poetry. Its merits, if any, are exclusively psychological." pocm itself.

·TIIEORY OF POETRY 65 worth was deeply interested in psychology, especially in those years when he was meditating The Prelude. In truth hc threw morc light on the workings of the Jiuman heart than any English poci—I do not speak of the great novelists-had donc since the Elizabethan age. But hic did not always succeed in transmuting his discoveries into poctry. There is something ominous in his declaration, in the Preface of 1800, that his chief object in the Lyrical Ballads was to make his themes inicresting " by tracing in them, trily though not ostcntatiously, the primary laws of our nature: chicfty as far as regards the manner in which we associatc idcas in a state of crcitement." But this in itself is a task for the psychologist : the poct must not only instruct but delight; and this Wordsworth sometimes fails to do. lic fails in Peter Bell. Ic fails, for much the samnc reason, in Goody Blake and the Anecdote for Fathers. Goody Blake is another study in superstition, this tinc of thic effect of a cursc on a course but superstitious mind, a study psychologically interesting but imperfectly poctircd. The Anecdote for Fathers merely records Wordsworth's discovery-not a new one of the odd reasons children will give when pestered with questions: Wordsworth evidently saw more in it, but what more lic aw he has failed to convey.

·CHAPTER VI POLITICS WORDSWORTH once said that for one hour's thought he had given to poctry he had given twelve to the condition and prospects of society. The statement, though not true of his Lyrical Ballads days, was truc at the time he made it, and serves at Icast to remind us that some of his noblest verse and all his most majestic prose was inspired by political passion. The fundamental fact about Wordsworth's politics is the fact that he was a true-born Englishman. Except for a half-legendary Scottish ancestress, his forbears on both sides of the house were purc English for many generations. His roots were struck very deep in English soil-how deep, it took a winter in Germany to teach him. The next thing to remember is that he was countryborn and country-bred. The England that he pined for in Germany was his own countryside. He knew it intimately, and loved it with all his heart. And he loved, if he did not quite know, its people: the city proletariat, which the Industrial Revolution brought into being in his lifctime, was always more or less strange to him, and its aspirations were, and remained, beyond the range of his sympathies. Finally, we must not forget that Wordsworth belonged by birth to the middle class. He was not an aristocrat like Byron or Shelley, nor a man of the people like Burns or Tom Paine. Hence a strain of moderation I had almost said a streak of cautionwhich kept him from going all lengths cren in his Radical days, but also set limits to his understanding of the working class, though not to his affection for them. He loved the people and wished them well, but he could not hob-nob with them as Burns did. Like CG ·POLITICS Scott he was the son of an attorney, and might have grown up as stout a Tory as Scott but for a circumstance that clouded his youth. His father, John Wordsworth, was factor to Sir James Louther, and WIS somchost induced to ſend him all his savings. This Sir James Lowther was a local despot, half-crazy in his petty tyranny, and when John Wordsworth dicd hc rcfuscel to disgorge the loan; in fact he never did disgorge it, and it was not till his death that the Wordsworths came into their patrimony-a circumstance little calculated to foster in a lad of Wordsworth's stiff, moodly tempor that respect with which Burke says wc look to nobility: At school lc mingled with his social cquals, sons of ycomcn or (like himself) of professional men; even between master and man a focling of cquality still cxisted in the Dales of his hoyhood. From the school republic of Iławksheard and the "almost visionary sepublic of the Dales, he passed to another republic in Cambridge, where all men werc equal as scholars and gentlemen, so that he reached manhood without mecting any onc who claimed considcration on the score of mank. When I add that his tcmper w39 naturally chement and impatient of constraint, and that personal freedom was thic breath of his nostrils, it will be soon that his mind was scady soil for the Revolutionary notions of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity: So much so that when the French Revolution actually camc lic felt that it was nothing out of nature, and had come rather late than soon 'This helps to cxplain his apparent indifference to the question of negro slavery, which was torturing Cowper at this icry time. To Wordsworth it seemed merely the rottenest branch of a rotten troc, to the root of which the axe had been laid. Only Ict all go well with France and slavery would ranish with the rest of our evil heritage from the past. But i anticipate. Wordsworth's interest in public affairs was first arouscd not by the French Revolution but by the aftermath of the American War. Ile had ·65 A STUDY OF WORDSWORTH been too young to know or think much about that war while it lasted; but when it was over disbanded men began to straggle back to the Lakes. One of these he mct during his first Long Vacation he has recorder their meeting in an unforgettable episode in The Prelude; others he must have heard of; and from what he saw and heard he conceived a horror of war with all the suffering it inflicts on the poor, especially on poor women, its most innocent and helpless victims. 'There is nothing so moving in An Evening Walk, which was begun at this time, as the lines that tell of the widow and orphans of the soldier who lies “Asleep on Bunker's charnel hill afar." So too the Female Vagrant in Guilt and Sorrow and Margaret in The Ruined Cottage are both victims of the Amcrican War. When the Bastillc fell in July 1789, Charles James Fox declared that its fall was the greatest thing that had ever lappened in history, and the best. We do not know what Wordsworth's feelings were at the time; but France must have been in all men's mouths at Cambridge during the session of 1789-1790, and when the summer term was over he set off with his friend Jones for a walking tour in France and Switzerlanda tour that was to have momentous consequences. They landed at Calais on 13th July 1790. It was the cvc of the day on which the King was to swear fidelity to the new Constitution, and the whole land was wild with joya 'France standing on the top of golden hours, And human nature scerning born again." For three days Wordsworth and Jones sailed down the Rhonc in company with a number of deputies who were returning from Paris to Marscilles. Englishmen were rapturously welcomed as visitors from the land of the free; the universal enthusiasm swept them off their feet; they joined the jubilant throng; The young ·POLITICS 69 66 even to they laughed, they quaffed, they danced the carmagnole. From Lyons they struck off for Switzerland, whither We need not follow them cxcept to note that even Wordsworth's new-born enthusiasm for France could not stifle a pang at the sight of desecrated monasteries. 'The Descriptite Sketches published in 1793 give the poct's impressions of what he saw on this tour; but chcir Rousscau-lihc praise of the child of Nature and their denunciations of despots belong rather to the Wordsworth of 1793 than to the Wordsworth of 1790 : his journal-letter to Dorothy, written at the time, contains no such reflections. Returning to Cambridge, he took his degree in January 1791, and then hung about in London and ciscw here for nearly a year, unable to settle on a profession. Whule he was in London hc heard Burke speak in the House of Commons. Marvellous orator! but as he wound away his never-ending horn the strain, transcendent as it was, grew tedious a young man's car." His mind was not yet ripe for Burkc. Then in November he suddenly went off again to France, ostensibly to perfect himself in the language, brut drawn also, one suspects, by the memory of what he had seen there the year before. Passing through Paris le pushed on to Orleans, and thence to Blois. In these towns he made to friends, of one of whom hic has told us nothing. The other was Michel Beaupuy, an officer in garrison at Blois, the one Republican in a mess of Royalists. Beaupuy's impassioned cloquence, and the miscry he saty with his own cyes among the hunger-bitten peasantry, converted him to the Revolutionary faith. lie became a patriot of the world; his licart was all given to the people and his love was theirs. October found him back in Paris, debating what to do. Should hc join the Girondins, put himself at their head, and, if Fate willed, perish with them? llc did not do so. Did his heart fail him? Or did the Muse herself dcfend her son. All we know is that before he could takc any fatal slep he was dragged back to London, ·70 A STUDY OF WORDSWORTH dragged," he tells us, " by a chain of harsh necessity.' What he docs not tell us is that the chain was of his own forging. The other friend whom he had made in France was a young Frenchwoman, Annette Vallon, with whom he fell violently in love. He had known for some months that she was with child; now her time was ncar, and he hurried back to England, “compelled," as the franker language of the original Prelude informs us, “by mere want of funds." He may have meant to return to Annette as soon as he had procured them; if so, he was too late. In January 1793 Louis XVI was executed, in February Francc went to war with Britain, and Wordsworth's return was cut off. In October, however, as I have already related, he managed to reach Paris, found the Terror raging, and fled for his life. While he was in London in 1793, Wordsworth onsortca sometimes with those Radicals who sat at illiam Godwin's feet and tricd to draw intellectual pport for their faith from the doctrines of his Political ice. In politics Godwin was what we should now call a philosophical anarchist. His ideal was a loose federation of 'states each so tiny that every one in it should know every one else, since argument would be the sole instrument of government, all men being naturally free, rational, perfectible, and (in essentials) cqual. It was under the spell of these lofty sophistries that Wordsworth made his first essay in political writing, in the shape of a Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff, in which he championed the cause of the French Revolution, defending even the exccution of the King, and scoffing at Burke as an infatuated moralist. Then turning to Britain he demonstrates the evils that flow from monarchy and aristocracy, with its unnatural law of primogeniture. If the general will is to prevail under representative government, the franchise must be universal and equal, parliaments short, re-election forbidden, and the powers of the executive reduced to a minimum, since government is at best but a necessary

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·2 A STUDY OF WORDSWORTH 1798-1799. 'That “mclancholy drcam," as he calls it, taught him two things: that his passion for France was dead, and that the love of England was twined about his hcart-strings. But the England that he loved was not yet the England of history. In luis youth he cared little for English history compared with the historics of Greece and Rome. 'l'he England that he loved was the England that his cyes had scen, the " dear native regions of his carliest verse, the mountains among which he had felt the joy of his desire for Lucy and the green fields that her dying cyes had surveyed. To these dear native regions he returned in December 1799 and made his home among them for the rest of his days. At Grasmere he prepared a second edition of the Lyrical Ballads, and in 1801 sent a copy of it to Charles James Fox with a letter which forms an important document in the history of his political development. He is still a democrat, as carnest as ever to show that men who do not wear finc clothes can feel decply. But he no longer talks of the gencral will, or of universal suffrage, or even of the miscry that war inflicts on the poor. What concerns him now is the threat 10 their domestic life which he sees in the spread of the factory system that devours their children and the operation of the new poor law that will break up their homes. He is back in his own countryside; his idcal now is that “almost visionary mountain republic” which he describes in his Guide to the Lakes as still existing in his boyhood towards the head of the Dales, a perfect republic of shepherds and agriculturists like his own Michael, each on his small hereditary farm, “Neither high-lorn nobleman, knight, nor esquire was there; but many of these humble sons of the hills had a consciousness that the land, which they walked over and tilled, had for more than five hundred years been possessed by men of their name and blood." Among such men family affection is found at its purest and strongest, when the love of father and son is bound up ·73 “There " POLITICS the love of hereditary property in land. o property so sacred as the property of the poor. v the unsolved riddle of social justice haunted ordsworth's mind in these years appears sometimes unexpected places. We should scarcely have read thought of it into Resolution and Independence ; ci in a letter of June 1802 he counts it among the hings that make the figure of the old lecch-gatherer o impressive that he moves about in lonely places, carrying with him his own fortitude, and the necessities which an unjust state of society has entailed upon him." During these years Wordsworth took little interest in foreign politics. But in August 1802, after the Peace of Amiens, he spent a month at Calais with Annette and their daughter, and doubtless made some settlement on them in view of his approaching, marriage. This visit completed his disillusionment with France. The liberator had turned tyrant. Henceforth France, Napoleonic France, was the enemy, and England, with all her faults, the last hope of freedom. And now in Wordsworth's hands, as in Milton's, the sonnet became a trumpet, to rouse England from her Mammonworship and nerve her for the struggle against the tyrant. As the struggle deepened, and ally after ally went down, Austria in 1805, Prussia in 1806, Wordsworth's courage rose to meet the rising peril :- "Another year ! another deadly blos! Another mighty Empire overthrown! And We are left, or shall be left, alonc: The last that dare to struggle with the Foe" And is the moral despair ? Never ! "O dastard whom such foretaste doth not cheer!" The integrity of soul which comes to those who h found a cause to live and die for pluchs . SIM out of the heart of danger :- "There came a Tyrant, and with holr sler Thou fought'st against him " ·A STUDY OF WORDSWORTH he loudest note of the trumpct proclaims again and gain the supreme duty of hope, of "Hope, the paramount duty that Heaven lays, For its own honour, on man's suffering heart." 'I began with hope," he said in 1808, "and hope has inwardly accompanied me to the end." If the poet was sometimes tempted to listen to the linnct's song and shut his ears to the sound and fury of European war, he was effcctually roused from such dreams when the French overran Portugal, and Napolcon put his brother on the throne of Spain. In 1808 Wellesley defcated Junot at Vimicro, but was superseded by Burrard and Dalrymple, who forthwith concluded a convention with Junot at Cintra, allowing the French to withdraw to France with all their arms and even their booty. The storm of indignation which this Convention of Cintra aroused in Britain found a voice in Wordsworth, In high-pilcd periods like thunder-clouds he denounced the British gencrals not only for surrendering an important military advantagein which he was possibly wrong, but also and chicfly for sacrificing the interests and, above all, the honour of our allics-in which he was unquestionably right, Hc thundered against the pusillanimity which regarded Napoleon as invincible, and proclaimed that in attacking a nation he had released against him forces over which his big battalions could not prevail. He had violated the sanctuary of the human heart and insulted its miglitiest and holiest affections ; henceforth his focs were exultations, agonies, and love, and man's unconquerable mind. In all this Wordsworth was a truc prophct, as Napoleon himself came at last to allow. Hitherto he had vanquished governments; it was when le trampled the cmbers of German nationalism into fame and outraged thc national sentiment of Spain that he dealt liimself a wound that drained away the lifc-blood of his Empirc. “The Peninsular War," he said afterwards, was a running sorc." The profcs- ·POLITICS 75 sional politicians could not see these things because they had not fathomed the penetralia of human nature. Man's life is not sustained by bread alone but by the feelings of the heart in his breast, by self-respect, by pride and patience in adversity, by admiration, gratitude, and love. "Now to the existence of these blessings,' Wordsworth declares, “national independence is indispensable; and many of them it will itself produce and maintain." National independence, civil liberty, a just constitution--these are the three great blessings of civilized society; but the greatest of these is national independence, and it means even more to the poor man than to the rich. The peasant has no partial interests or false philasophies to distract him from love of the soil that bred him and pride in his country's heroes. It was not the Spaniards that Wordsworth was addressing but worldlings at home, who, if they cared nothing for the ruined honour of another country must care little for the honour of their own. It was Britain's duty, he proclaimed, having secured her own independence, to help other nations to win theirs ; and he preached a triceless war against Napoleon until French militarism should be crushed. Wordsworth's tract On the Convention of Cintra, neglected when it appeared and for a hundred years after, has taken on a new meaning for our generation. It revealed him as the prophet of a force which was thenceforth to shape the destinies of Europe, for good or for evil-the force of Nationalism. Wordsworth's own Nationalism was sane. He saw that there were cases in which neighbouring and kindred nations, like England and Scotland, might agree to forgo some of the pride of separate nationhood in order to set their common independence on a broader and surer foundation; and he looked forward to a time when a United Peninsula, formed by the free union of Spain and Portugal, a United Italy, a United Germany, and a France reduced to her natural boundaries, with Russia and this United Kingdom, should create a new balan ·76 A STUDY OF WORDSWORTH of power in Europe and for ever prevent the rise of another Napolcon. Some of Wordsworth's hopes werc fulfilled in the ninctcenth century. Alas! the fervent prophet did not forcsce that in the twenticth the Age of Tyrants would return, and Nationalism spawn its own Napolcons. He did not forcscc them, but he knew the breed: he might be writing not for his own age but for ours when he thus describes the invasion of Spain "It is, I allow, a frightful spectacle to soc the prime of a vast nation propelled out of their territory with the rapid sweep of a horde of Tartars; moving from the impulse of like savage instincts; and furnished, at the same time, with thosc implements of physical destruction which have been produced by science and civilization. . . . With a like perversion of things, these appetites of barbarous (nay, what is far worse, of barbarized) men arc embodied in a new frame of polity, which possesses the consistency of an ancient Government, without its cmbarrassments and weaknosscs. And at the head of all is the mind of one man who acts avowedly upon the principle that every thing, which can be donc safcly by the supreme power of a state, may be done." Wordsworth did not underrate the strength of the cnemy. But his faith in moral forces never wavered. "For present annoyance," hc declared, “his power is, no doubt, mighty : but liberty . . , is far mightier ; and the good in human nature is stronger than the evil." For more than twelve years Wordsworth had thrown himself heart and soul into the struggle against Napolcon; by the end of it his political views had undergone a profound change. In the tract on the Contention of Cintra, the accent of the old Girondin can still be heard in many a phmse; he still acclaims Washington as the chicf of men, still denounces the American War and the first attack on the young French ·He POLITICS 77 Republic as crimes, asserts the supremacy of the Legislature and calls the King the Chief Magistrate; though he slights the "paradoxical reveries." of Rousseau, he still speaks of the "general will" and still believes in the natural goodness of the plain man. That was in 1808. By 1818 he was zealously supporta ing Lord Lonsdale's Tory nomince for the representa, tion of Westmorcland; by 1823 Mrs Clarkson found him and his family completely Torified." ensconced himself deeper and deeper in English institutions, identified himself more and more closely with the Established Church and the landed interest, and for their sakes opposed the repeal of the Test Act, the Catholic Relief Bill, and the first Reform Bill; resisted the admission of Dissenters to Cambridge "tooth and nail"; and actually withstood the Dissenters' Chapels Bill, which proposed no more than to give Dissenters a legal title to their own meeting-houses, chapels, and burial grounds! Nevertheless, Wordsworth maintained that, though he might have erred in his judgment of persons, his principles had never changed. In one sense this was true: he never ceased to love the pcople and desire their welfare. But politics have to do with means no less than ends; and to claim that your principles are unchanged because you still desire the general good is as if a man gazing at the sun from dawn to dusk should maintain that he has always been looking in the same direction because he has always been looking at the same object. It is too simple a solution to say either that Wordsworth sold himself for a sinecure, or that he merely gained wisdom with age. Wordsworth's was not a simple nature, nor were the situations simple with which he had to deal. Consider first his attitude to foreign affairs. Crabbe Robinson imagined a future biographer noting Wordsworth's silence on the struggles 1 "Just for a handful of silver he left us." Browning had in mind the office of Distributor of Stamps which Wordsworth obtained through Lord Lonsdale's influence.

·6 A STUDY OF WORDSWORTH of power in Europe and for ever prevent the rise of another Napolcon. Some of Wordsworth's hopes were fulfilled in the ninetcenth century. Alas! the fervent prophet did not foresce that in the twentieth the Age of Tyrants would return, and Nationalism spawn its its own Napoleons. He did not foresee them, but he knew the breed: he might be writing not for his own age but for ours when he thus describes the invasion of Spain "It is, I allow, a frightful spectacle to soc the prime of a vast nation propelled out of their territory with the rapid sweep of a horde of Tartars; moving from the impulse of like savage instincts; and furnished, at the same time, with those implements of physical destruction which have been produced by science and civilization. . . . With a like perversion of things, these appetites of barbarous (nay, what is far worse, of barbarized) men are embodied in a new frame of polity, which possesses the consistency of an ancient Government, without its embarrassments and weaknesses. And at the head of all is the mind of one man who acts avowedly upon the principle that every thing, which can be done safely by the supreme power of a state, may be done." Wordsworth did not underrate the strength of the cnemy. But his faith in moral forces never wavered, "For present annoyance, he declared, is, no doubt, mighty : but liberty ., is far mightier ; and the good in human nature is stronger than the evil.” For more than twelve years Wordsworth had thrown himself heart and soul into the struggle against Napolcon; by the end of it his political views had undergone a profound change. In the tract On the Convention of Cintra, the accent of the old Girondin can still be heard in many a phrase; he still acclaims Washington as the chief of men, still denounces the American War and the first attack on the young French his power ·POLITICS 77 > Republic as crimes, asserts the supremacy of the Legislature and calls the King the Chief Magistrate ; though he slights the "paradoxical reveries of Rousseau, he still speaks of the "general will" and still believes in the natural goodness of the plain man. That was in 1808. By 1818 he was zealously supporting Lord Lonsdale's Tory nomince for the representa: tion of Westmoreland; by 1823 Mrs Clarkson found him and his family " completely Torified." He ensconced himself deeper and deeper in English institutions, identified himself more and more closely with the Established Church and the landed interest, and for their sakes opposed the repeal of the Test Act, the Catholic Relief Bill, and the first Reform Bill; resisted the admission of Dissenters to Cambridge tooth and nail"; and actually withstood the Dissenters' Chapels Bill, which proposed no more than to give Dissenters a legal title to their own meeting-houses, chapels, and burial grounds! Nevertheless, Wordsworth maintained that, though he might have erred in his judgment of persons, his principles had never changed. In one sense this was true: he never ceased to love the people and desire their welfare. But politics have to do with means no less than ends; and to claim that your principles are unchanged because you still desire the general good is as if a man gazing at the sun from dawn to dusk should maintain that he has always been looking in the same direction because hc has always been looking at the same object. It is too simple a solution to say either that Wordsworth sold himself for a sinecure,' or that he merely gained wisdom with age. Wordsworth's was not ple nature, nor were the situations simple with which he had to deal. Consider first his attitude to foreign affairs. Crabbe Robinson imagined a future biographer noting Wordsworth's silence on the struggles 1 "Just for a handful of silver he left us." Browning had in mind the office of Distnbutor of Stamps which Wordsworth obtained through Lord Lonsdale's influence, ·78 A STUDY OF WORDSWORTH of Spain and Prussia for civil liberty and of Greece for national independence, and concluding that the great poet had died in 1814 as far as life consists in active sympathy with the temporary welfare of his fellow creatures." Wordsworth took the jibe in good part: "I could give you the other side," he said. Had he done so he might have maintained that, Spain and Prussia having secured their independence, what they made of it was their affair. But how could the author of the Cintra tract have defended his silence on the Greck War of Independence, or explained away the fact that, when Canning called in the New World to redress the balance of the Old by recognizing the South American Republics, his only reaction was a fear of offending Spain? The truth seems to be that his ardent patriotism had burnt up his cosmopolitanism; from a patriot of the world he had become a patriot of England, and anxiety for her Icft little room in his mind for rcmoter cares. When that anxiety had relaxed a little, or had itself for thc moment become a little remote during his Italian tour of 1837, he was ablc to interest himself in Italy's aspirations and to write sympathetically of the Carbonari. His old interest in Spain also revived to some cxtcnt: in 1838 he sent Crabbe Robinson a " squib," as he called it, on Colonel Evans, who had commanded a British levy against the Carlists in 1835; and in 1844 we find him grieving over state murders committed in Spain without remorse.' But by that time he had rcally grown old, fearful of all change, and content in all things to awnit God's good time." I turn next to his views on domestic politics. In 1847 Crabbe Robinson wrote of Wordsworth : Indeed by nature he is a liberal, tho' accidents have cast him among the adversarics." The first of these accidents” was the attitude of the various political parties to the prosecution of the war with Napoleon. \Vhen invasion was expected in 1803, Wordsworth had I Did Crabic Robinson tempoml"? mean ·POLITICS implored Britons of all parties to have one soul and keep Britain free or perish to a man. The appeal was ineffectual. Many of the Whigs were lukewarm in their opposition to France, and some of the Radicals spoke and wrote as if they had been briefed by Napoleon. To Wordsworth the prosecution of the war à outrance was a matter of life and death, and only in the Tory ranks did he find a party that was as resolute for it as he. British freedom, he felt, was doubly imperilled when the foreign foe was aided by dissension at home; and as the war went on dissension spread until to his eyes it threatened actual revolution. In the light of events we may look on his fears as exaggerated, but they were shared by one of the stoutest hearts among his contemporaries, Sir Walter Scott feared a Jacqueric: "The ground is mined below our feet," he wrote to Southey in 1812. The fear of foreign conquest vanished with the victory of Waterloo ; but the fear of revolution remained In the “dear years" that followed the end of the long war, unemployment and destitution, amounting in some districts to starvation, fanned the flames of popular discontent and kept Wordsworth's fears at fever-heat. Next to foreign conquest, revolution was of all things the most abhorrent to hum. Even in his Republican days he had recoiled from the bare Idea of a revolution in England. He had lived through one revolution and could not bear the thought of Enother. The foci of sedition, as he saw it, lay in the creat manufacturing towns, where Radicalism and Dissent were nfe; the landed interest and the Church England were the twin pillars of national stability. These were the sentiments that inspired his Address to e Freeholders of IVestmoreland in 1818. By 1820 the danger of revolution had receded. In next decade Wordsworth's fears transferred theni- In 1812 he had written: "The lower orders have been for vards of thirty years accumulating in pestilential masses of orant population."

·80 STUDY OF WORDSWORTH selves to the Catholic Relief Bill, which he opposed vchemently, partly from a constitutional horror of Popcry and pricstcraft, but chiefly becausc he believed that the ultimate aim of the advocates of the Bill was nothing short of Irish independence, and therefore saw in it thic thin end of a wedge which, driven home, would disrupt thc Empire. Once again France was the danger ; he saw Britain, with a liostilc Ireland on her flank, faced with a France that had rcabsorbed the Low Countries and stretched, a mighty power, from Bayonne to the mouths of the Rhinc. Scarcely was that cause lost? when a new and more pressing danger loomcd up in the shape of the First Reform Bill. That surely was the beginning of the end. The transfer of political power from the landed to the manufacturing interest would be followed by a determined attack on privilege, property, and religion. Even if it did not come to that, to sacrifice agriculture to manufacture would turn us into "the white ncgroes of the world." In these years Wordsworth despaired of England. He spoke of taking refuge in Austria : “I shall look for the quietest nook I can find in the centre of Austria".so he wrote in July 1832. But as time went on, and nothing very direful happened, le plucked up hcart again and recovered some of his confidence in mankind. In 1841 Crabbe Robinson reports: "W.'s tone is far more liberal than it used to bc." Crabbe was a Libcral, and naturally made the most of any sign of grace in his idol; but in 1843 Wordsworth himself wrote to Henry Reed: “I will not conccal from you that, as far as the people are capablc of governing themsclves, I am a democrat and in 1847 he told the Chartist Thomas Cooper : have always said that the people were right in what they asked," adding that they were sure to have the franchise as knowledge increased, but must avoid violence. The liberal side of Wordsworthi's nature, submerged for many years by alarm after alarm, is Icast 1 The Catholic Relief Bill was passed in 1829. ( i I ·POLITICS apparent in his attitude to. Dissent, where odium theologicum og and most consistently He could not bear to devoured by the Moloch of the factory, system; in a famous passage in The Escursion, of which H.M.I. Mir Arnold made unseemiy fun, he pleaded cloquently for compul. sory national education; even when supporting the Government candidate in 1818 he censured the Government for their neglect of Poor Law Reform ; and in 1835, at the nadir of his political despair, he asserted uncompromisingly that the unemployed had a right to State-aid. In the field of Social Reform, then, Wordsworth might fairly claim to have been true to his principles. But the rest of his political philosophy changed as his confidence in mankind ebbed or flowed-and it ebbed for many ycars, reaching low-water mark after the passing of the Reform Bill. On the morrow of the French Revolution he dreamed that human nature had been born again. Regenerated man stood erect in his manhood, free, rational, and good, according to Nature's holy plan. Government, in Swift's phrase, a plain thing, and fitted to the capacity of many heads" : universal and equal suffrage was the panacea for all human ills. (Even in those days, however, Wordsworth would not make a clean sweep of the British Constitution which contained such valuable clements as the English Common Law and Trial by Jury:) As the Revolution swept on its course, he awoke to the fact that human nature had not been reborn; that men do not tum into angels overnight; on the contrary, that once the crust of custom is broken through ugly monsters rise from the depths; that government is not a plain thing, and unbridled democracy is a short step to tyranny. Then, as he explored the penetralia of human nature, he discovered that in civil society as in the individual life there are porrers more august than abstract reason. He did not abandon his tyas ·A STUDY OF WORDSWORTH >> at once: in 1808, as we have seen, he still speaks mes with the tongue of Rousseau. But by 1818 sseau has been finally dethroned. Burke is now oracle; the " infatuated moralist" of 1793 has come the wisest of the moderns.' The lesson to ich Wordsworth had been deaf in 1793 had at ngth been brought home to him by the logic of events ach as Burke had foreseen : he had come to perceive nat a civil society is not a joint-stock company but a iving organism, rooted in the past, and growing, if it truly grows, not by the application of abstract formulæ about the imprescriptible rights of man, but by the laws of its own nature, which are embodied in its institutions and discoverable only from its history. He had neglected English history in his youth; he now began to study it, and especially to study the history of the most venerable of England's institutions, her National Church. The ideal state which he .contemplated in his Addresses to the Freeholders of Westmoreland was something more comprehensive than a mountain republic of shepherds and agriculturists ; it was a system in which high-born noble, knight, and esquire would also find a place--a "mellowed feudality" such as still held out in rural Westmoreland, a social pyramid bound together by the “moral cement" of personal loyalty, not by the soulless cash nexus which alone linked employers and employed in manufacturin towns. Yet Wordsworth never became “completely To fied,” never quite forgot that the lowest stratum int social pyramid consisted not of helots but of free-b Englishmen; and as his confidence in mankind revi a little in his old age, so did the hope revive that workers of England might "in God's good time raised by education and made fit to take a share is government. And if "mellowed feudality” was beyond recall, its place might be taken by a Chi honse of brotherhood between master and man. his letter to Henry Reed in July 1844.

·CHAITER VII RELIGION THOSE who call Wordsworth a renegade in politics accuse him, with equal simplicity, of being an apostate in religion, his bad angel being in the one case Lord Lonsdale, in the other " my brother the Dean." It is true that the changes in Wordsworth's attitude to the Church ran more or less parallel to the changes in his political views; but religion has an inward as well as an outward aspect, and in middle life, as I shall show, Wordsworth really suffered a change of heart. If he was not a worldly-minded turncoat, neither was he all his days the consistently orthodox Anglican that some of his admirers would make him out to be. His religious development was a long, and at times a painful, process; confusion arises if we fail to distinguish its successive phases. Wordsworth's family belonged to the Church of England, and to that party in it which came to be called High. His mother was a good Churchwoman: of his few recorded memories of her, two are connected with the church--he remembered how she once sent him to catechism with a nosegay in his breast, and another cime rebuked him for complaining that they had not given him a penny at church. Her brother, with whom Dorothy lived for years, was Rector of Forncett and a Canon of Windsor. Such were Wordsworth's home surroundings; his school was a Church of England foundation, and the Church of England still held a monopoly of the English Universities. So from childhood to manhood he grew up in an Anglican atmosphere. But there is nothing to show that he was a notably pious child; nor in his teens did he go through any of those religious crises, isually attended with conviction of sin, which are ·84 A STUDY OF WORDSWORTH common phenomenon of adolescence. His higher emotions apparently found satisfaction at that time in a passionate love of Nature, “ That had no nccd of a remoter charm, By thought supplicd, or any interest Unborrowed from the cye. It was the same at Cambridge. The Cambridge of Wordsworth's undergraduate days was a stronghold of the Evangelical Movement: two of its leaders, Isaac Milner and Charles Simon, were Cambridge dons. The Evangelical Movement was in effect an offshoot of the Mcthodist Revival, propagated within the Established Church itself. But neither Evangelicals nor Methodists found favour with Wordsworth, nor did he ever find favour with them. In 1850 Crabbe Robinson remarks: “The Evangelicals within and without the Church have been his despisers.” Wordsworth never seems to have recognized that Methodism was one of the most powerful of the influences that saved England from revolution. On the contrary, all Disscnt and Methodism had by that time become a form of Dissent was associated in his mind with ·RELIGION 85 G his fzuhers wiborst question or serious reflection, eri pomnitions of a dezpet and more personal faith come to hin zt tins in the solitude of his native mountain, 5.0+2bly on that moming at Hankshezd who left him z'dedicated spirit. Von among the submits of tz Alps came the revelation that Nature *25 ia vero truth the living zad visible garment of Det, that ali the elements of the scene which he tedd were best sorting of one mind, Cance of the gut Appealypse Tre type d'Emitte 0! End Izr.,odmir, und without eod." in the ye233 that followed, the resclation which had UP him in the alps wes or crezut for a tice by dords of sexual and political passion. But before I FTC the story of Wordsworth's inner lift, I must och for a moment on his outward fortunes. When be le Cambridge in January 1791 he was faced with the City of chroring a profession. The army was beyond has czos; the Lay he dislited; there remained the Church. He decided half-heartedly to take orders, not ficam 27 sense of rocztion, but seeing in the Church the only career that seened feasible for him: his urds, thc Pector, would get him a curzcy. He had rct 2ba-dood this idea when he went to France in Vorember 1791. In May 1792, in the middle of his 2 air with Angee Vallon, we find hird telling his friend M:73 that he m.2.3 to take orders net vinier or spring. Ardret. February, by which time he was back bus parsmazze in which she won leader, her evet, in Ezad, Dorothy is still dreaming happily of the Words orth's opinions had vadergone 2 change: in February 1797 he told Matthens that he could not " by Carin his mind” to złe orders. In after ye215 Kui ii oe bumbly, saying that he had not felt himself and through for the Church; but his bzughts k.gaze to Vauhens is true to his frzine of mind at ·86 A STUDY OF WORDSWORTH the time. For by 1794 he had fallen under Godwin's influence, and his conventional beliefs were crumbling away. Hazlitt reports him as saying about this time to a young friend, "Throw away your books of chemistry, and read Godwin on Necessity.” And Coleridge avers that when first they met, which was in September 1995, Wordsworth was at least a semi-atheist." Doubts have been cast on both these statements, but without justification. It may be that neither Hazlitt nor Coleridge was in all cases a trustworthy witness; but their attitudes to Wordsworth and to religion--were so different that when they agree on a point like this their joint testimony must be accepted. Why should it not? Godwin, though Coleridge converted him later, was a dogmatic atheist when he wrote Political Justice, and I find no difficulty in believing that Wordsworth was "at least a scmi-atheist " while he was under Godwin's spell. His subjection did not last long. When he came to apply the principles of Political Justice to concrete cases, dragging every problem of conduct to the bar of abstract reason, the monstrous futility of the calculus of conscquences was revealed. Rationalism liad failed him; he sank into mcrc scepticism and abandoned moral questions in despair. “This was the crisis of that strong disease," that miasma of despondency which had hung about him ever since he came back from France. Among the causes that brought on the discase he has recorded only those which concerned public affairs--his impotent rage against thc British Government which had torn up his faith in England by the roots, and the smirching of his ideal of France by the Terror. But these causes were aggravated by personal anxictics about his own future and the fate of Annette and her child. The importance of this Annette cpisode has been cxaggcrated because it was so long concealed. Its belated discovery set would-be psychologists agog to find in it the key to the whole of Wordsworth's after-life. When they tell us that in his (curiously ·RELIGION S; numerous) poems about forsaken komen he 1175 working off his remorse for his desertion of Annette, there may be something in what they say, though remorse" and " desertion" are not the right words ; but when they go on to maintain that the early withering of his genius was the nemesis of repressed passion, they no longer deserve what Jane Austen calls "the compliment of rational opposition." If that was nemesis, it dogged the offender with a very lame foot: ...phornith .::.'; the surtace of Worus will luna ius genug , not upheave it from its depths. To speak plainly, the morality of Wordsworth's age took a less stern view of these things than either the prudery of his Victorian biographer or the inverted prudery of his Georgian critics. His passion for Annette had to contend almost from the first with his passion for the Republican cause, and his winter in Germany taught him that both these passions were dead and turned his heart back to England and his first love. The course of Wordsworth's "strong disease" had been marked by the composition of Guilt and Sorrow, The Borderers, and the first draft of The Ruined Cottage. It had passed its crisis by the time he settled at Racepes for France pierre ; Raisley icial anxieties; warmed hy his sister's love and Coleridge's admiring friendship, he gradually regained his mental tone. He recovered his sense, not of the beauty of Nature--that he had never lost—but of the life and joy in her; and as he did so his mind reverted to an earlier teacher than Godwin, one whose influence had been strong upon him when he wrote his Descriptive Sketches. Rousscau had taught him that, though Society had grown corrupt through man's abuse of his free-will, Nature remained good as she came from her Maker's hand; the way to find L:L ·88 A STUDY OF WORDSWORTH happiness was to return to Nature, to the life of feeling and instinct. He expressed this thought seriously in the Lines Written in Early Spring, and half playfully in Rob Roy's Grave, with its praise of the creatures of flood and field which live in peace and peace of mind. The contrast of Nature and Society was not a constant thought with Wordsworth, but it left one trace upon his mind. It is false to say that he averts his ken from half of human fate; he has dealt often and unflinchingly with human suffering ; but he does tend to avert it from the dark side of Nature, to remember the lamb and forget the tiger. But Wordsworth could not long be content, any more than Whitman, “to live with the animals," with the life of feeling and instinct. As his mental health improved his visionary power revived; he began again to look through Nature to Nature's God, and, with the mctaphysical aid of Coleridge, to see more clearly the significance of his visionary experiences. He had lost the high bcatitude of youth; he could not ignore pain and evil, he who had lived through the Terror ; but in moments of illumination he was aware of something far more deeply interfused in the universe than evil and pain. He had reached his full stature, and began to write those poems which have given him his unique place in the history of English poetry and English thought. I am not concerned here with the poetry of these years in its formal aspect but with the philosophy that underlics it. I use the term philosophy" in a popular sense. Wordsworth was not a metaphysician, he was a poet; he thought not in syllogisms but in images, as he has said himself: "On Man, on Nature, and on human lifc, Musing in solitude, I oft perceive Fair trains of imagery before me risc." But though his thoughts clothed themselves in images they were nonc the less important for that. It is more bellclcttrism to extol Wordsworth's poetry and decry ·PELIGIOS As philosophr. His philosophy was the clo bis poetry Cornered Txorery different riens bare breukendte 1.-", ; ( ne te ECC Locke to Hume, Hanlar, and Prix, i that he owed many of his leading ideas to the come tionism of David Hartles. I do cot deny that some Word's bear a resembarce, eren 2 strinz rece, to some of Hegel's. But there 523 Caree bouches Kordsworth's pert. He bet kokio Gran metaphysics beyond what he may have been for Coleridge, and detested when te kom. Wit Crabbe Robinson in 1849 te thaked Here are te had never read a word of Gaman metrios; tiene en remembering his correspondents process, te zberemo chills," though I doubt 1.at they at Eden i Some tastes." A fet worths earlier Ezérmed himself more frankly to Honey Peed: transcendentalism would be a woeful echte world where it not sure to be as pernicious." So much for Vicent's decir Germans. His debt to Hartley is ons lees farci Socrate be iness about Hanley. He mentong binnen te though only 03, 23 22 ide of a moto before his time, and he mos have led chitre Coleridge and Lamb. In 1755 Coloide mere bringe first-bon after Hartles, of whom he was forme admirer; and next year we find Lamb rece Harley's "fire! Votises to Conduct" to CC 3. promising subject for a free the eviderice, external of internal, to prometu Vio ever studied Harley. There is too Harami 64 iܐܡܕܪܨܐ 1 ·90 A STUDY OF WORDSWORTH works in his library at Rydal Mount, nor anı: books that he left behind him at Racedown internal cvidence amounts to no more than th: in the Preface of 1800 he says that one of h objects in the Lyrical Ballads is to show how it associated in a state of excitement. But what is to Hartley is not the doctrine of the association o which was known to Plato and Aristotle and but his theory of the mechanism of sensati. idcation as consisting of vibrations in the nerv vibratiuncles in the modullary substance of the Wordsworth knows nothing of vibrations and uncles. His whole conception of the origin and st: of the human mind is fundamentally irrccoi. with Hartley's. To Hartley, as to Locke, the n birth is a tabula rasa; not so to Wordsworth : "Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God who is our home." God is our home, and to Him as to our home wi that is the sum of Wordsworth's theology. To I the love of God is rooted in the hope of Heav the fear of Hell. Of the love of Nature he says no our pleasure in natural beauty derives from the se pleasures of sight, hearing, taste, smell, and tou people who have formed cxalted ideas of the go and power of the Author of Nature fcel the pleasures of devotion when they view His wor very phrases show that Hartley regards God as i the same relation to Nature as a watchmaker b a watched conception in Wordsworth's views injurious to religious education. Then we are to Wordsworth Icarncd his optimism from E Wordsworth's optimism rested on his faith is: soul's Divine destiny and its power to tran: suffering; Hartley's on the simple reckoning that scnsiblc plcasures are far more numcrous thanı': sensible pains. In short, all that is most distincti.

·<1 ++ COM- 66 RELIGION 91 Wordsworth's thought is foreign to Hartley, and when it is fathered on llartley his loftiest paradoxes are turned into platitudes, What Ied to the discovery of this mare's nest was scemingly a remark of Coleridge's to the effect that Wordsworth treats man as man, a subject of cye, car, touch, and taste, in contact with all external nature, not " informing the senses from the mind " but pounding a mind out of the senses."? This remark of Coleridge's contains an important half-truth. In his Kantian phase Coleridge regarded the phenomenal world as created by the human mind imposing the forms of its thought on the blind material of sensation. Nature, he held, has no life of her own; she lives only in our life, and the celestial light which invests her to the glad cyes of youth comes from those eyes themsclves. Wordsworth thought far otherwise. For him le is a manifestation, active principle' mind of man. In communicating with her he communicates with it; and thus the senses, through which he communicates with Nature, fced his soul, being in Blake's phrase) the chief inlets of soul in this age. This is why Wordsworth can say without hyperbole that Nature is the guardian of his heart and soul of all his moral being; to her he owes that purity of heart which makes him fit to see God. How did Wordsworth conceive of the "active principle" in the years of his poetic prime? The question has sometimes been put, "Was he a pantheist or a panentheist " The difference is vital for those who claim that, except for his brick lapse into Godwinism, Wordsworth was always an orthodox 1 Table-Talk, 214 July 1832. On receiving The Excursion, Coleridge paid Wordsworth out for Peter Bell by explaining at some length how he would have wrinen The Recluse as a poetical exposition of Kantian tran. scendentalism.

·A STUDY OF WORDSWORTH christian; for an orthodox Christian may say that Jature is in God, but not that Nature is God. We ught not to :ssume, however, that Wordsworth's ecconversion was the work of a moment; in returning from "semi-atheisin " to orthodoxy he may well have passed through a stage which could fairly be called pantheistic. It might fairly be doubted whether thic author of T'intern Abbey conceived of the "something far more deeply interfused" as it transcendent and personal Dcity: 'By the time he published The Excursion (1814) Wordsworth had grown very sensitive to the charge of “Spinosism." It was based, he said, on : passionate expression incautiously uttered in Pintern Abbey, which his accuser had read in coldheartedness, substituting the letter for the spirit. And he added, rather anxiously: "Unless I am mistaken, there is nothing of this kind in The Excursion," and went on to cxplain away the similc of the boy and the shell," which has something ordinarily, but absurdly, called Spinosistic," as being dramatically appropriate in the mouth of the Wanderer when he meets the sceptic on his own ground. A morc answerablc question is raised when we ask what was Wordsworth's attitude to Christianity at this time. In 1798 Coleridge said of him, “Hc loves and reverences Christ and Christianity; ' I wish he did morc and under 24th October 1803, Anima Pocter records a conversation in which Wordsworth and Hazlitt "spoke so irreverently and malignantly of the Divinc Wisdom that it oversct me." Coleridge's evidence may be suspect or ambiguous, but there is the cvidence of the poems themselves. Pantheistic o panentheistic, the poems of this period, from Tinter- Abbey to the Immortality Odc, contain nothing that definitely Christian. It is not that they never refer the central mysterics of thc Christian faith.mt Incarnation, thc Atonement, thc Resurrcction--but the the whole way of salvation which they imply has for these mysterics. It is through Natúre ale ·RELIGION 93 >) that the poet communicates with the "active principle of the Universe; she is the soul of all his moral being. The natural mystic needs no Redeemer; his soul mounts Heavenwards by its own impulse and its own cfforts. This may be Platonism, but it is not Christianity. Late in life, commenting on two sonnets which he had translated from Michael Angelo, he observed that the second of them was evidently written in Angelo's advanced years, " when it was natural that the Platonism that pervades the one should give way to the Christian feeling that inspires the other." "It was natural"; he spoke from his own experience. Between 1798 and 1802 Wordsworth made four attempts to give an account of the visionary experiences on which his mystical faith was based, namely in Tintern Abbey (1798), in The Pedlar (1798-1802), in The Simplon Pass (1799), and in a piece of blank verse which he wrote between 1798 and 1800 and probably meant at first to include in The Prelude, though he did not finally do so. The first three passages are so familiar that we are in danger of thinking that we understand them because we know them by heart. I shall therefore quote the last, and quote it'in full, as being at once the boldest and the least hackneyed statement of Wordsworth's mystical creed :- "I seemed to leam. That what we see of forms and images Which float along our minds, and what we feel Of actise or recognizable thought, Prospectiveness, or intellect, or will, Not only is not worthy to be deemned Our being, to be prized as what we are, But is the very littleness of life. Such consciousness I deem but accidents, Relapses from the one interior life That lives in all things, sacred from the touch Of that false secondary power by which Isneakness we create distinctions, then Behere that all our puny boundaries are this Which we perceive and not which we haver - In which all beings live with God, there - ·A STUDY OF WORDSIORTH Are God, existing in the mighty wholc, As indistinguishable as the cloudless East At noon is froni tlic cloudless West, when nil The hemisphere is one ceruican bluc." "Themselves are God”: is this pantheism or panentheism ? In the hour of ccstasys thic mystic does not ask himself such questions, or any questions. His wholc being is an awareness of God, a union or communion in which thought expires in blessedness and love. But when the high hour of ecstasy is past, the mind begins to think again, and seeks to render itself an account of its cxperience. When Wordsworth came to incorporate The Simplon Pass in the Sixth Book of The Prelude, hc prcfaced it with a passage which sums the conclusions of his reflective thought in this, the mystical phase of his spiritual life. When he learned that they had crossed thc Alps, " Imagination," he says, rose from the mind's abyss. I was lost; Halted without nn cffort to break through; But to my conscious soul I now can say "I recognize 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, Thcre harbours; whether we be young or old, Our destiny, our being's heart and home Is with infinitude, and only there." The operative words arc "now" and "thy." The iminedinte effect of the tidings was trance; but now, looking back on that visionary experience, and reading it with other such experiences, lc perceives its glorious significance for himself. The soul that can see the Divine in Nature must itself he Divine. It bclongs to a world beyond the finite world of sensc, and its truc life is a ccascless pressing on towards that infinite life which is its essence and its end. Thus Wordsworth freca hiinself completely from that external and mechanical conception of the relation of God to Man and Nature which had prevailed throughout the ·Among his RELIGION 95 cighteenth century, as if God had withdrawn into his Heaven, haring "made" Vature once for all, to supply man's bodily needs, not to speak peace to his soul. precursors, Cowper came nearest to Wordsworth in this, and might have come still nearer but that, believing himself damned, he could not find in his orn breast the God of whom he had glimpses in Nature. To Wordsworth the God in Van and in Nature is one. "The otrl of Pallas does not fy," says Hegel,“ rill dusk has fallea." It was then his private illumination had faded away that Wordsworth set himself to philosom phize upon it in the Immortality Ode. The soul, he tells us, comes from afar, and the light of its heavenly home lingers on it in its innocent childhood; but the embodied soul must assume its earthly burden and take its place in the world of men, and, as the auroral light of its home dies away, must learn to live by duty not by instinct. But though the heavenly light has gone, the memory of it remains to remind the soul of its Dirine origin and destiny. The pre-existence of the soul is assumed throughout. In his timid old age Wordsworth was alarmed to learn that this assumption Fuad prored a rock of offence to pious readers who found no warrant for it in the Bible, and he made haste to coplain it away. The structure of the poem, he said, rested partly on two of his own experiences in childhood the dreamlike splendour which invested objects of sight, and the difficulty of admitting the notion of death as applicable to his own being. Having to wield some of the clements of his experience when he 23 impelled to write the Ode, “I took hold," he says, of the notion of pre-existence as having sufficient foundation in humanity for authorising me to make for my purpose the best use I could of it as a Poet." So "The soul that rises with us, our life's star, Lath had elsewhere it setting." is mere poetry? I annot believe it. If these words do not mean pre-existence they mean nothing. It is ·94 A STUDY OF WORDSWORTH 40 Are God, existing in the mighty whole, As indistinguishable as the cloudless East At noon is from the cloudless West, when all The hemisphere is one cerulean bluc." « Themselves are God”: is this pantheism or panentheism? In the hour of ecstasys the mystic does not ask himself such questions, or any questions. His whole being is an awareness of God, a union or communion in which thought expires in blessedness and love. But when the high hour of ecstasy is past, the mind begins to think again, and seeks to render itself an account of its expcrience. When Wordsworth came to incorporate The Simplon Pass in the Sixth Book of The Prelude, he prefaced it with a passage which sums the conclusions of his reflective thought in this, the mystical phase of his spiritual life. When he learned that they had crossed the Alps, “ Imagination," he says, rose from the mind's abyss. I was lost; Halted without an effort to break through ; But to my conscious soul I now can say-- "I recognize thy glory;" in such strength Of usurpation, when the light of sense Goes out, but with a flash that has rcvcaled 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." The operative words are now” and “thy." The immediate effect of the tidings was trance; but now, looking back on that visionary experience, and reading it with other such experiences, hc perceives its glorious significance for himself. The soul that can sce the Divine in Nature must itself bc Divine. It belongs to a world beyond the finite world of scnsc, and its truc life is a ccaseless pressing on towards that infinite life which is its essence and its end. Thus Wordsworth frced himself complctcly from that cxternal and mechanical conception of the relation of God to Man and Nature which had prevailed throughout the >> ·RELIGION 95 cighteenth century, as if God had withdrawn into his Heaven, having "made" Nature once for all, to supply man's bodily needs, not to speak peace to his soul. Among his precursors, Cowper came nearest to Wordsworth in this, and might have come still nearer but that, believing himself damned, he could not find in his own breast the God of whom he had glimpses in Nature. To Wordsworth the God in Man and in Nature is one. “The owl of Pallas does not fly," says Hegel," till dusk has fallen." It was when his private illumination had faded away that Wordsworth set himself to philosophize upon it in the Immortality Ode. The soul, he iells us, comes from afar, and the light of its heavenly home lingers on it in its innocent childhood; but the cmbodied soul must assume its earthly burden and take its place in the world of men, and, as the auroral light of its home dies away, must learn to live by duty not by instinct. But though the heavenly light has gone, the memory of it remains to remind the soul of its Divine origin and destiny. The pre-existence of the soul is assumed throughout. In his timid old age Wordsworth was alarmed to learn that this assumption had proved a rock of offence to pious readers who found no warrant for it in the Bible, and he made haste to explain it away. The structure of the poem, he said, rested partly on two of his own experiences in invested tting the Having yume of the elements of his experience when he was impelled to write the Ode, "I took hold," he szy's, of the notion of pre-existence as having sufficient foundation in humanity for authorising me to make for my purpose the best use I could of it as a Poet." So "The soul that rises with us, our life's star, Hath had clsen here its setting," is mere poetry? I cannot believe it. If these words do not mean pre-existence they mean nothing. It is 1:1.L..1 ·96 A STUDY OF WORDSWORTH easier to believe that Wordsworth at seventy-three had forgotten what he meant when he wrote the Ode at thirty-five. Daubtless even when he wrote it he had no definite notion of the naturc of the soul's pre-natal state. The child's recollections of it are "shadowy." But however shadouy they may be, they "Are yet the fountain-light of all our day, Are yet a master-light of all our secing," In the Platonic notion of pre-existence he found a conception that unified the recollections of his childhood with the visionary experiences of his youth, assigning to the soul a Divine origin that accorded with its Divine destiny. The first four stanzas of the Immortality Ode were written in 1802. By that time Wordsworth's visionary power had departed, never to return except for moment in 1818, "upon an Evening of Extraordinary Splendour and Beauty." As his private illumination faded he began to feel the need of that support to the spiritual life which comes when two or three are gathered together and faith is buttressed with institution. At this point an event occurred which precipitated the impending change. In February 1805 his brother John, captain of the East Indiaman "Abergavenny, went down with his ship. John was the dearest of all his brothers, and his sudden death was the first great personal calamity that had befallen Wordsworth since his father died twenty-two years before and that loss he had been too young to feel deeply for long. He had scen death and suffering in France; he had known anger and shame and disillusionment in the years that followed his return to England; but thesc, so to speak, had been public griefs, and for them he had found a sufficient consolation in his mystical communion with Nature and, through her, with the Wisdom and Spirit of the Universe. But now God had put forth His hand and touched his bone and his flesh. In his deep distress he turned, as others in like case have turned, to the ·RELIGION consolations of revealed religion, with its promise of personal immortality and its assurance of Christian tellowship. The need for fellowship finds expression in the Stangas Suggested by a Picture of Peelé Castle. From boyhood he had feli, perhaps too much," the self-sufficing power of solitude but now distress has humanized his soul, and he cries, "Farewell, farewell, the heart that lives alone, Housed in a dreann, at distance from the Kind!" (In his self-reproach he speaks of his solitary musings as dreams.). His letter of rath March to Sir George agents ? Why have we sympathies that make the best of us so afraid of inflicting pain and sorrow, which yet we see dealt about so lavishly by the supreme governor? Why should our notions of right towards each other, and to all sentient beings within our influence, differ so widely from what appears to be His notion and rule, if everything were to end here? Would it not be blasphemy to say that, upon the supposition of the thinking principle being destroyed by death, however inferior we may be to the great Cause and Ruler of all things, we have more of love in our nature than He has The thought is monstrous; and yet how to get rid of it, except upon the supposition of another and a beller worid, I do not see." Far-off echoes of Wordsworth's meditations on pain and sorrow in these years may be heard in The Ithite Doe of Rylstone, the story of a soul "enskied and sainted by suffering, upheld by memory and reason, and companioned in its desolation by the innocence of Nature, symbolized in the magical figure of the white doe—a strange poem, perhaps the most finely conceived of all Wordsworth's longer poems, and the most difficult, moving as it does in an ais almost too farefied for human breathing. 13 ·98 A STUDY OF WORDSWORTH In The Excursion wc can follow the itincrary of Wordsworth's spiritual journey from scmi-atheism to orthodoxy. "The composition of The Excursion extended over many years. The original Ruined Cottage, which is the nucleus of it all, belongs to Raccdown days : indeed, the scene of it is laid in Dorsct. The Pedlar, in which it was wrapped up, was first written at Alfoxden in 1798, but was still being altered and arranged " in 1802. In 1804, with The Prelude half written, Wordsworth tricd 'to resume his great philosophical poem, The Recluse; but repeated appeals failed to extract from Coleridge the notes which he had promised for that magnum opus, and when at last he did set them down in Malta, the bearer of his letter caught the plague, and all his papers were burned, Coleridge's ideas among. them. Deprived of Coleridge's metaphysical aid for his high argument Wordsworth, about i809, attacked his task from another quarter: he turned back not to the fragmentary Recluse but to The Podlar, and decided to continue it and makc of it the navc of that Gothic Church of which the unpublished Prelude was some day to be the ante-chapel. Prospectively, then, The Excursion was an instalment of The Recluse ; in another sense, and that the scnsc which most concerns us here, it simply resumed and continued The Prelude. Wordsworth's own mind was still the main haunt and region of his song, though he disguised its autobiographical significance by introducing three interlocutors besides himself-the Wanderer, the Solitary, and the Pastor. The Wanderer is obviously an idealized Wordsworth, Wordsworth as he might have been if he had been born on a Highland croft ? and never gone to France. The story of his cducation resumes and idcalizes the substance of Books I and II of The Prelude; his arguments against despondency restate in more abstract form the substance of Books XI and XII. The figure of the Solitary is not a self- 1 In the 1798 version thc Podlar (i.e. the Wanderer) is : Cumbrian.

·RELIGIOY portrait in the same sense, being in fact a composite picture with its main features taken from the Rey. Joseph Fawcett; but it represents the eclipse of faith through which, or the penumbra of which, Vordstorth had passed when he came back from France; while the Pastor, who is much more slightly sketched, stands for the orthodox position to which Wordsworth was brother's death, the most important character in the poem is the Wanderer, and the most important thing about him 13 his relation to the Pastor. "Educated by Nature, like Wordsworth, he becomes a fit mouthpiece for the natural mysticism, now grown more definitely theistic, of the poet of Tintern Abbey, the original Prelude, and the Immortality Ode. He had been reared in the strict discipline of the Scottish Church, 23 Wordsworth in that of the English; but a long and happy life spent in communion with Nature and acts of kindness to men had sublimed away all that was harsh and forbidding in his early creed, and left an undogmatic faith in God, such as a gentle dreamer, a natural mystic, might evolve from the promptings of his own pure heart. And so he stands for Natural Religion-say rather, the Religion of Nature, When be refers, as he seldom does, to Revelation, his language is sometimes curiously ambiguous, as if he thought that the Garden of Eden and the Fall of Man might be not historical facts but symbols of the heaven that lies about us in our infancy and is lost as we grow older. It is with arguments drawn from the Religion of Nature that he refutes the despondent scontirism of 2.

·IOO A STUDY OF WORDSWORTH significant is the fact that there is no collision in argument between him and the Pastor, who treats him, as do the other characters, with a deference that is almost reverential. The Religion of Nature is not repudiated, but melts, as it were, into the fuller day of Revelation. Wordsworth had returned to orthodoxy. Like others who have come by the mystic way, he found anchorage for his faith in the Gospel of St John. Yet misgivings remained. It was long before he attained, if he ever did attain, the sober certainty of faith which his wife enjoyed. For Wordsworth, to return to orthodoxy meant to return to the Church of England. It was the Church of his family and of the Tory party into which circumstances had drawn or driven him in the course of the Napolconic Wars. He had another and a less personal reason. He had proclaimed that " by the soul Only, the nations shall be great and frec." His study of English History, including that study of Church History which afterwards yielded the Ecclesiastical Sonnets, convinced him that the Church of England was the appointed guardian of England's soul, and his own observation had taught him that in many parts of the country only the clergy of the Established Church stood between the people and barbarism. Having returned to the Anglican Church, Wordsworth accepted most of her dogmas with no such rescrvations as the Wanderer might have made, except that for long he could not bring himself to swallow the comminatory clauses of the Athanasian Creed. As the years went on he identified himself more and more closely with the interests of the Church, temporal as well as spiritual : he would shed his blood for her he would rather dic a thousand deaths than scc the Church in Ireland dispossessed. These passionate expressions of loyalty command our respect more readily than the obscurantism which saw in the cholera ·ror RELIGION epidemic God's judgment on the Reform" Bill, or the bigotry which opposed so plain a piece of justice as the Dissentcrs' Chapels Bill." His dislike of Dissenters was partly, of Roman Catholics largely, political. Apart from politics he found much to admire in Roman Catholicism, though he had a horror of Popery and priestcraft. He sympathized with the Tractarian movement in its reverence for antiquity, but feared its papistical tendencies; if these prevailed he prophesied a civil war-which would start in Scotland. These things belong to what Aubrey de Vere called his prose mind, and need not be dwelt on. Unfortunately his narrowing orthodoxy infected his poetic mind as well. When he revised The Prelude in or about 1840 he laboured, as Professor de Selincourt has shown, to excise or qualify every expression that might be thought to smack of Spinosism." A single instance may suffice to show the general trend of this recension: in 1805 he had spoken of books as Powers "For ever to be hallowed ; only less, For what we may become, and what we need, Than Nature's self, which is the breath of God;" in 1840 he added the line "Or Iſis pure Word by muracle revealed." But neonatoh. niorenar. ... 1 The Prelude lose that he made The Ruined Cottage, out of which that book grew, and which can still be detached from it without leaving a scar, told the story of Margaret, a poor woman whose husband had been driven by unemployment to enlist, and who waits for his return year after year, half-crazed with grief and hope deferred, and sinking deeper and deeper into poverty and misery, till costage and garden go to 1 is so ruin: " Yet still She loved this wretched spot, nor would for worlds Have parted hence; and still that length of road, ·102 A STUDY OF WORDSWORTH And this rude bench, onc torturing hopc cndcarcu, Fast rootcd at her heart: and here, my Friend, In sickness she remained ; and here she died, Last human tenant of these ruined walls." So at first the story cnced, an unrelieved, heart-breaking tragedy, an aftermath of the mood that had produced Guilt and Sorrow. But when he put it into thc Podlar's mouth, in which form it appears in Book I of The Excursion, he uscd his narrator's mystical picty to blunt the sharp edge of the tragedy and moss its harsh outlines over with quictist reflections on the healing power of Nature and the transicncc of human life and suffering : "I well remember that thosc vcry plumes, Those weeds, and the brigh spear-grass on that wall, By mist and silent rain-drops silvered o'er, As once I passed, did to my heart convey So still an image of tranquillity, So calm and still, and looked so beautiful Amid the uncasy thoughts which filled my mind, That what we fcci of sorrow and despair From ruin and from change, and all the gricf Thc passing shows of being leave behind, Appeared on idle drcam that could not live Wherc meditation was. So the lines stood in 1814. But when he revised the poem for the final cdition of 1845 hic changed the last clause to " that could maintain, Nowhere, dominion o'er the enlightened spirit Whose meditative sympathics rcposc Upon the breast of laith.' Not content with this, he went back on the Pedlar's speech, and inscrted these lines :- Nor morc would she have asked as due to One Who, in her worst distress, lad oftrimes felt The unbounded might of prayer; and learned, with soul Fixed on the Cross, that consolation springs From sources dccpc: far than deepest pain For the muck Sufferer

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103
lines utterly untrue to the impression which the story
of Margaret Icaves on our minds, and quite irreconcil.
able with the language in which he has just described
her as living
"Through the whole winter, reckless and alone."
These three versions, read in succession, tell the
whole story of Wordsworth's long pilgrimage.

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