[Footnote: Delivered extempore at Manchester.]
The history of Wordsworth’s poetry truly reflects the man. His life was outwardly uneventful but inwardly full of conflict, discovery, and progress, and Providence seems to have ordered the outward life to favour the poetic life within. Educated in the country and living mostly in nature’s society, he escaped the violent external changes some poets have suffered. Fully able to make his way in the world, he chose to withdraw and work out in solitude what seemed to him his life’s true destiny.
The element in which Wordsworth’s mind lived was a Christian pantheism. Old Testament poets speak of everything as the work of God’s hand: we are the “work of his hand”; “The world was made by him.” The New Testament has a higher form for our relation to him: “We are his offspring,” not the work of his hand but children from his heart. Our poet Goldsmith, with a genius’s instinct, says God “loved us into being.” I think this is true of the world as well as of man. The world is not merely something God made and subjected to laws; it expresses the thought, feeling, and heart of God himself. It must, for if man is God’s child, would he not feel out of his element in a world that came only from God’s hand and not his heart? This belief that God is in everything and shows himself in everything was much brought to light by the poets of the last generation, and I hope still influences those of the present. We are not satisfied that the world should merely prove and vary the intellect of God. That was Paley’s view: from the world’s mechanism he taught us to believe in a God. But even if his argument is entirely correct, it proves only a mechanical God.
Let us go further. Looking at beauty, let us believe that God is the first of artists, that he put beauty into nature knowing and intending how it would affect us, and embodied his grand thoughts there for us to see and be glad. Further still, let us believe that whatever we feel in the highest moments of truth shining through beauty, whatever comes to our souls as a power of life, is meant for us to see and feel, and is not the work of his hand but the flowing forth of his heart, his love of us, blessing us in the union of his heart and ours.
Wordsworth is the high priest of nature so regarded. He saw God present everywhere, though not always directly: in the awful mountain-peak, sky-encompassed with loveliness, or in the face of a little child, which is as it were eyes in the face of nature, he felt the solemn presence of the Divine Spirit. Keats recognized this presence only as the spirit of beauty; to Wordsworth, God as the Spirit of Truth was manifested through the external world.
Wordsworth’s life, I have said, was so ordered as to bring this out of him, in the forms of his art, to the ears of men. Even in childhood nature’s influence partly developed his conscience. He describes it in retrospect:—
A little boat, tied to a willow tree,
Within a rocky cave, its usual home.
Straight I unloosed her chain, and stepping in,
Pushed from the shore. It was an act of stealth,
And troubled pleasure, nor without the voice
Of mountain echoes did my boat move on,
Leaving behind her still, on either side,
Small circles glittering idly in the moon,
Until they melted all into one track
Of sparkling light. But now, like one who rows
Proud of his skill, to reach a chosen point
With an unswerving line, I fixed my view
Upon the summit of a craggy ridge,
The horizon’s utmost boundary; far above
Was nothing but the stars and the grey sky.
She was an elfin pinnace; lustily
I dipped my oars into the silent lake,
And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boat
Went heaving through the water like a swan;
When, from behind that craggy steep, till then
The horizon’s bound, a huge peak, black and huge,
As if with voluntary power instinct,
Upreared its head. I struck and struck again,
And, growing still in stature, the grim shape
Towered up between me and the stars, and still
For so it seemed, with purpose of its own,
And measured motion like a living thing,
Strode after me. With trembling oars I turned,
And through the silent water stole my way
Back to the covert of the willow tree;
There in her mooring place I left my bark,
And through the meadows homeward went, in grave
And serious mood; but after I had seen
That spectacle, for many days, my brain
Worked with a dim and undetermined sense
Of unknown modes of being; o’er my thoughts
There hung a darkness, call it solitude,
Or blank desertion. No familiar shapes
Remained, no pleasant images of trees,
Of sea, or sky, no colours of green fields;
But huge and mighty forms, that do not live
Like living men, moved slowly through the mind
By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.
So nature gave a fresh impulse to his life even in boyhood. If we have had a similar experience we can enter into his feeling; if not, the tale will seem almost incredible.
One passage more shows what Wordsworth felt toward nature in his youth and how he grew from it. Nature laid up in his mind and heart her most beautiful and grand forms, to be brought out later for the highest human service. I quote a few lines from the poem, deservedly a favourite of all Wordsworth’s lovers, “Lines written above Tintern Abbey”:—
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion; the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite; a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye.—That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur; other gifts
Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompense. For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh, nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
Here you see nature’s influence growing on the poet’s mind, and nature passing into poetry, form sublimed into speech. You see the mind of man meeting the mind of God manifested in his works, spirit coming to know the speech of spirit; the poet receives what flows from spirit in nature and utters again, in his form, what God has uttered in his. Wordsworth wished to give man what he found in nature: a power of good, a world of teaching, a strength of life. He knew nature was not his, and that his enjoyment of it was given him to give to man. It was man’s birthright.
But what did Wordsworth find in nature? To begin with the lowest: amusement. Right amusement is part of teaching, its childish form, and finding it in nature takes us near the root of good. As proof I cite a poem you probably know, “The Daisy.” The poet sits playing with the flower, listening to the odd resemblances it suggests. He likens the daisy to—
Staring to threaten and defy,
That thought comes next—and instantly
The freak is over,
The shape will vanish—and behold
A silver shield with boss of gold,
That spreads itself, some faëry bold
In fight to cover!
Look at the last stanza too, and see how close amusement may lie to deep and earnest thought:—
When all my reveries are past,
I call thee, and to that cleave fast,
Sweet silent creature!
That breath’st with me in sun and air,
Do thou, as thou art wont, repair
My heart with gladness, and a share
Of thy meek nature!
But Wordsworth also found joy in nature, a better thing than amusement and so easier to find. We can often have joy where we can have no amusement,—
That floats on high o’er vales and hills
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What Health the show to me had brought.
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.”
This is the joy of the eye, so far as that can be separated from the joy of his whole nature; it was simply joy, with no further teaching, no attempt to find the truth beneath the beauty. We are not always to be hungry and restless even after truth itself. If we keep our minds quiet and ready to receive truth, and sometimes hunger for it, that is enough.
A step higher, he sometimes draws a lesson from nature, almost forcing a meaning from her. I do not object, if he does not make too much of it as existing in nature; he is finding a meaning he brought to it. The meaning exists, if not there. For illustration I refer to another poem. Observe that he found the lesson because he looked for it and would find it.
With shadows flung from leaves—to strive
In dance, amid a press
Of sunshine, an apt emblem yields
Of Worldlings revelling in the fields
Of strenuous idleness.
This ceaseless play, the genuine life
That serves the steadfast hours,
Is in the grass beneath, that grows
Unheeded, and the mute repose
Of sweetly-breathing flowers.
Whether or not he forced this lesson from nature, it is a good one, teaching much about life and work.
Again, nature sometimes flashes a lesson on his mind, gives it to him, and when nature gives, we cannot but receive. As in this sonnet composed during a storm,—
Yet failed to seek the sure relief of prayer,
Went forth; his course surrendering to the care
Of the fierce wind, while mid-day lightnings prowl
Insiduously, untimely thunders growl;
While trees, dim-seen, in frenzied numbers tear
The lingering remnant of their yellow hair,
And shivering wolves, surprised with darkness, howl
As if the sun were not. He raised his eye
Soul-smitten; for, that instant, did appear
Large space (mid dreadful clouds) of purest sky,
An azure disc—shield of Tranquillity;
Invisible, unlooked-for, minister
Of providential goodness ever nigh!
Observe that he was not looking for this and had not thought of praying; his distress had benumbed his spirit’s going out toward the only source of sure comfort. He went into the storm, and the uproar outside matched the tumult in his soul. Suddenly a clear space in the sky makes him feel, without time to think, that a shield of tranquillity is spread over him. For was it not as it were an opening into the region where there are no storms, the region of peace because of love, truth, and purity, the home of God himself?
There is a yet higher, more sustained influence of nature: she puts a man in the mood in which thoughts come of themselves. That is perhaps the best nature can do for us, and certainly higher than mere intellectual teaching. That she did this for Wordsworth is clear and easily understood. If the world came from God’s imagination and man from God’s love, it is easy to believe that what came from his imagination should rouse the best thoughts in a being who came from his love. That, I think, is the relation between man and the world. As an instance I refer to one of Wordsworth’s finest poems, which he classes under “Evening Voluntaries,” composed on an evening of extraordinary splendour and beauty:—
With flying haste, I might have sent,
Among the speechless clouds, a look
Of blank astonishment;
But ’tis endued with power to stay,
And sanctify one closing day,
That frail Mortality may see—
What is?—ah no, but what can, be!
Time was when field and watery cove
With modulated echoes rang,
While choirs of fervent Angels sang
Their vespers in the grove;
Or, crowning, star-like, each some sovereign height,
Warbled, for heaven above and earth below,
Strains suitable to both. Such holy rite,
Methinks, if audibly repeated now
From hill or valley, could not move
Sublimer transport, purer love,
Than doth this silent spectacle—the gleam—
The shadow—and the peace supreme!
And solemn harmony pervades
The hollow vale from steep to steep,
And penetrates the glades.
But, rooted here, I stand and gaze
On those bright steps that heaven-ward raise
Their practicable way.
Come forth, ye drooping old men, look abroad,
And see to what fair countries ye are bound!
No less than Nature’s threatening voice,
From THEE, if I would swerve,
Oh, let Thy grace remind me of the light
Full early lost, and fruitlessly deplored;
Which, at this moment, on my waking sight
Appears to shine, by miracle restored;
My soul, though yet confined to earth,
Rejoices in a second birth!”
Picture the scene, and observe how it moves in him a sense of responsibility and the prayer that, if he has in any matter wandered from the right road, or forgotten the simplicity of childhood in the toil of life, he may remember from now on the vow he records: from now on to press toward the unseen things that are manifested through the seen. I refer you also to “Resolution and Independence,” commonly called “The Leech Gatherer,” and to the grandest ode ever written, the “Ode on Immortality.” Whatever you think of his theory in the latter, it proves that nature was to him a divine teaching power. I do not mean that nature’s teaching alone would have shown a man these things; the soul must be tuned to them. Wordsworth could not have found such things in nature had he not known something more definite and helpful; but that known, nature was full of teaching. When we understand the Word of God we understand his works; when we know an artist’s nature we know his pictures; when we have known and talked with the poet we understand his poetry far better. To the man of God all nature is changeful reflections of the face of God.
Loving man as he did, Wordsworth was anxious to give him this teaching. How? By poetry. Nature put into the crucible of a loving heart becomes poetry. We cannot explain poetry scientifically, because poetry is beyond science. The poet may be a scientist and the scientist a poet, but poetry includes science, and the man who will advance science most is the one who, other qualifications equal, has most poetic faculty. Wordsworth defines poetry as “the impassioned expression which is on the face of science.” Science deals with the construction of things: the casting of the earth’s granite ribs and the thousand operations that produce what appears on its surface. But grass-bearing meadows, heaven-reared hills, streams that go ever downward, fountains that ever arise, the wind among the leaves and the odours it carries, colour, shape, and sound: these are poetry’s material. Science deals with the underwork. For what does this central world exist, with its hidden winds and waters, upheavals and downsinkings, frame of rock and heart of fire? Not for themselves, surely, but for the world of beauty that floats up, as it were, to the surface of the shapeless region of force. Science has to do with the one, poetry with the other. To illustrate: you find the first primrose of the year and feel almost as if you had found a child, a new beauty and joy though you have seen it a thousand times. A little flower that looks at me, thinks itself into my heart, and gives me a pleasure I feel I could not do without. The impassioned expression on its face is its childhood: trust, consciousness of protection, faith, and hope. Science, in the botanist, comes after you and pulls it to pieces to see its construction, and delights the intellect; but that science is dead and kills what it touches. The flower exists not for it but for the expression on its face, its poetry, which makes you feel the flower is just growing out of the heart of God. The intellect itself is only the scaffolding for building up the spiritual nature.
This is plainer if you suppose a human form created without a soul. Divine science has put it together, but only for the sake of the soul that will shine out and make it live, move, and have its own being in God. When you see the face lit with soul, with thought, feeling, joy, and love, you know that this is what it was made for. So you see poetry’s relation to science, and, in an apparent paradox, that the surface is deepest after all: through the surface, for whose sake the building went on, we have a window into the depths of truth. Every living form in the world is a window cloven through the blank darkness of nothingness, letting us look into the heart, feeling, and nature of God. So the surface of things is best and deepest, provided it is not mere surface but the impassioned expression for which the science of God has thought and laboured.
Satisfied this was poetry’s nature, and wanting to convey it to his fellows, Wordsworth may be supposed to have asked, “What vehicle shall I use? Where am I to find the right language for speaking such great things to men?” He saw that eighteenth-century poetry (he was born in 1770) was artificial, not like nature, with no more originality than a picture copied a hundred times without going back to the original. Apart from much of Cowper and Thompson, it seems agreed that nothing should be said naturally: a set form was used for things that should never be said twice the same way. Wordsworth resolved to go back to natural simplicity of speech and have none of these stereotyped forms. “Where shall I find,” he asked, “the language that will be simple and powerful?” He concluded it was the language of the common people. Your experience may be that this is not poetical. True, but not even a poet speaks poetically in his stupid moments. Wordsworth meant the common people’s language in their uncommon moods, their high and therefore simple moods, when grief, hope, reverence, worship, or love moves them; there he believed he could find just the language for the poet. As far as it goes, I think he was right. The poet will of course have needs that the language of a man whose thoughts never moved in such directions cannot meet, but the kind of language is right, and I have heard it among the common people myself: language they did not know to be poetic, which fell on my ear and heart as profoundly poetic in feeling and form.
In carrying out this theory I won’t say Wordsworth never broke his own laws, but he held to it to the last. A friend of the poet told me Wordsworth had said he believed he would be remembered longest not by his sonnets, as the friend thought, but by his lyrical ballads, those for which he was reviled and laughed at, most by critics who could not understand him and were unworthy to read what he wrote. As proof let me read three verses of a poem especially marked for derision:—
Beside the springs of Dove;
A maid whom there were none to praise,
And very few to love.
Half hidden from the eye;
Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and Oh!
The difference to me.
The last line was especially chosen for ridicule; but I think most of us will feel its very simplicity overflows with suggestion and throws us back on our own experience. Instead of trying to utter what he felt, he says in plain words, “You who have known anything of the kind will know what the difference to me is, and only you can know.” In one of his essays he says his intention is that the poem’s interest shall owe nothing to the circumstances, but that the circumstances shall be made interesting by the thing itself. Most novels, for instance, try to interest us in worthless, commonplace people we would rather not meet by surrounding them with peculiar and extraordinary circumstances; that is a low source of interest, and Wordsworth was determined to owe nothing to it. For illustration let me read the well-known little ballad “The Reverie of Poor Susan,” which bears out his theory entirely. The scene is in London:—
Hangs a Thrush that sings loud, it has sung for three years;
Poor Susan has passed by the spot, and has heard,
In the silence of morning, the song of the Bird.
A mountain ascending, a vision of trees;
Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide,
And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside.
Down which she so often has tripped with her pail;
And a single small cottage, a nest like a dove’s,
The one only dwelling on earth that she loves.
The mist and the river, the hill and the shade:
The stream will not flow, and the hill will not rise,
And the colours have all passed away from her eyes!
Is any of the interest here owing to the circumstances, in what is a very common incident? Yet has he not treated it so that it is not commonplace in the least? We recognize in this girl just the feelings we find in ourselves, and acknowledge almost with tears her sisterhood to us all.
I have tried to make you feel something of what Wordsworth attempts, but I have not given you his best poems. Let me finish with the closing portion of the Prelude, published after his death, addressed to Coleridge:—
And all will be complete, thy race be run,
Thy monument of glory will be raised;
Then, though (too weak to head the ways of truth)
This age fall back to old idolatry,
Though men return to servitude as fast
As the tide ebbs, to ignominy and shame
By nations sink together, we shall still
Find solace—knowing what we have learnt to know—
Rich in true happiness, if allowed to be
Faithful alike in forwarding a day
Of firmer trust, joint labourers in the work
(Should Providence such grace to us vouchsafe)
Of their deliverance, surely yet to come.
Prophets of Nature, we to them will speak
A lasting inspiration, sanctified
By reason, blest by faith: what we have loved,
Others will love, and we will teach them how;
Instruct them how the mind of man becomes
A thousand times more beautiful than the earth
On which he dwells, above this frame of things
(Which, ’mid all revolution in the hopes
And fears of men, doth still remain unchanged)
In beauty exalted, as it is itself
Of quality and fabric more divine.