Classic Poem

'Never forget what, I believe, was observed to you by Coleridge, that
every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great or
original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished;
he must teach the art by which he is to be seen.... My ears are
stone-dead to this idle buzz, and my flesh as insensible as iron to
these petty stings.' These sentences, from a letter written by
Wordsworth to Lady Beaumont in 1807, may remind us of the common
attitude of his reviewers in the dozen years when most of his best
poetry was produced. A century has gone by, and there is now no English
poet, either of that period or of any other, who has been the subject of
criticism more just, more appreciative, we may even say more
reverential. Some of this later criticism might have satisfied even that
sense of wonder, awe, and solemn responsibility with which the poet
himself regarded the operation of the spirit of poetry within him; and
if we desire an interpretation of that spirit, we shall find a really
astonishing number of excellent guides. Coleridge, Hazlitt, Arnold,
Swinburne, Brooke, Myers, Pater, Lowell, Legouis,--how easy to add to
this list of them! Only the other day there came another, Mr. Walter
Raleigh. And that the best book on an English poet that has appeared for
some years should be a study of Wordsworth is just what might have been
expected. The whirligig of time has brought him a full revenge.

I have no idea of attempting in these two lectures another study, or
even an estimate, of Wordsworth. My purpose is much more limited. I
think that in a good deal of current criticism, and also in the notions
of his poetry prevalent among general readers, a disproportionate
emphasis is often laid on certain aspects of his mind and writings. And
I should like to offer some words of warning as to this tendency, and
also some advice as to the spirit in which he should be approached. I
will begin with the advice, though I am tempted at the last moment to
omit it, and simply to refer you to Mr. Raleigh, who throughout his book
has practised what I am about to preach.


1.

There have been greater poets than Wordsworth, but none more original.
He saw new things, or he saw things in a new way. Naturally, this would
have availed us little if his new things had been private fancies, or if
his new perception had been superficial. But that was not so. If it had
been, Wordsworth might have won acceptance more quickly, but he would
not have gained his lasting hold on poetic minds. As it is, those in
whom he creates the taste by which he is relished, those who learn to
love him (and in each generation they are not a few), never let him go.
Their love for him is of the kind that he himself celebrated, a settled
passion, perhaps 'slow to begin,' but 'never ending,' and twined around
the roots of their being. And the reason is that they find his way of
seeing the world, his poetic experience, what Arnold meant by his
'criticism of life,' to be something deep, and therefore something that
will hold. It continues to bring them joy, peace, strength, exaltation.
It does not thin out or break beneath them as they grow older and wiser;
nor does it fail them, much less repel them, in sadness or even in their
sorest need. And yet--to return to our starting-point--it continues to
strike them as original, and something more. It is not like
Shakespeare's myriad-mindedness; it is, for good or evil or both,
peculiar. They can remember, perhaps, the day when first they saw a
cloud somewhat as Wordsworth saw it, or first really understood what
made him write this poem or that; his unique way of seeing and feeling,
though now familiar and beloved, still brings them not only peace,
strength, exaltation, but a 'shock of mild surprise'; and his paradoxes,
long known by heart and found full of truth, still remain paradoxes.

If this is so, the road into Wordsworth's mind must be through his
strangeness and his paradoxes, and not round them. I do not mean that
they are everywhere in his poetry. Much of it, not to speak of
occasional platitudes, is beautiful without being peculiar or difficult;
and some of this may be as valuable as that which is audacious or
strange. But unless we get hold of that, we remain outside Wordsworth's
centre; and, if we have not a most unusual affinity to him, we cannot
get hold of that unless we realise its strangeness, and refuse to blunt
the sharpness of its edge. Consider, for example, two or three of his
statements; the statements of a poet, no doubt, and not of a
philosopher, but still evidently statements expressing, intimating, or
symbolising, what for him was the most vital truth. He said that the
meanest flower that blows could give him thoughts that often lie too
deep for tears. He said, in a poem not less solemn, that Nature was the
soul of all his moral being; and also that she can so influence us that
nothing will be able to disturb our faith that all that we behold is
full of blessings. After making his Wanderer tell the heart-rending tale
of Margaret, he makes him say that the beauty and tranquillity of her
ruined cottage had once so affected him

That what we feel of sorrow and despair
From ruin and from change, and all the grief
The passing shows of Being leave behind,
Appeared an idle dream, that could not live
Where meditation was.

He said that this same Wanderer could read in the silent faces of the
clouds unutterable love, and that among the mountains all things for him
breathed immortality. He said to 'Almighty God,'

But thy most dreaded instrument
For working out a pure intent
Is Man arrayed for mutual slaughter;
Yea, Carnage is thy daughter.

This last, it will be agreed, is a startling statement; but is it a whit
more extraordinary than the others? It is so only if we assume that we
are familiar with thoughts that lie too deep for tears, or if we
translate 'the soul of all my moral being' into 'somehow concordant with
my moral feelings,' or convert 'all that we behold' into 'a good deal
that we behold,' or transform the Wanderer's reading of the silent faces
of the clouds into an argument from 'design.' But this is the road round
Wordsworth's mind, not into it.

Again, with all Wordsworth's best poems, it is essential not to miss the
unique tone of his experience. This doubtless holds good of any true
poet, but not in the same way. With many poems there is little risk of
our failing either to feel what is distinctive of the writer, or to
appropriate what he says. What is characteristic, for example, in
Byron's lines, On this day I complete my thirty-sixth year, or in
Shelley's Stanzas written in dejection near Naples, cannot escape
discovery, nor is there any difficulty in understanding the mood
expressed. But with Wordsworth, for most readers, this risk is
constantly present in some degree. Take, for instance, one of the most
popular of his lyrics, the poem about the daffodils by the lake. It is
popular partly because it remains a pretty thing even to those who
convert it into something quite undistinctive of Wordsworth. And it is
comparatively easy, too, to perceive and to reproduce in imagination a
good deal that is distinctive; for instance, the feeling of the
sympathy of the waves and the flowers and the breeze in their glee, and
the Wordsworthian 'emotion recollected in tranquillity' expressed in the
lines (written by his wife),

They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude.

But there remains something still more intimately Wordsworthian:

I wandered lonely as a Cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills.

It is thrust into the reader's face, for these are the opening lines.
But with many readers it passes unheeded, because it is strange and
outside their own experience. And yet it is absolutely essential to the
effect of the poem.

This poem, however, even when thoroughly conventionalised, would remain,
as I said, a pretty thing; and it could scarcely excite derision. Our
point is best illustrated from the pieces by which Wordsworth most
earned ridicule, the ballad poems. They arose almost always from some
incident which, for him, had a novel and arresting character and came on
his mind with a certain shock; and if we do not get back to this through
the poem, we remain outside it. We may, of course, get back to this and
yet consider the poem to be more or less a failure. There is here
therefore room for legitimate differences of opinion. Mr. Swinburne
sees, no doubt, as clearly as Coleridge did, the intention of The Idiot
Boy and The Thorn, yet he calls them 'doleful examples of
eccentricity in dullness,' while Coleridge's judgment, though he
criticised both poems, was very different. I believe (if I may venture
into the company of such critics) that I see why Wordsworth wrote Goody
Blake and Harry Gill and the Anecdote for Fathers, and yet I doubt if
he has succeeded in either; but a great man, Charles James Fox, selected
the former for special praise, and Matthew Arnold included the latter in
a selection from which he excluded The Sailor's Mother. Indeed, of
all the poems at first most ridiculed there is probably not one that has
not been praised by some excellent judge. But they were ridiculed by
men who judged them without attempting first to get inside them. And
this is fatal.

I may bring out the point by referring more fully to one of them. Alice
Fell was beloved by the best critic of the nineteenth century, Charles
Lamb; but the general distaste for it was such that it was excluded 'in
policy' from edition after edition of Wordsworth's Poems; many still who
admire Lucy Gray see nothing to admire in Alice Fell; and you may
still hear the question asked, What could be made of a child crying for
the loss of her cloak? And what, I answer, could be made of a man poking
his stick into a pond to find leeches? What sense is there in asking
questions about the subject of a poem, if you first deprive this subject
of all the individuality it possesses in the poem? Let me illustrate
this individuality methodically. A child crying for the loss of her
cloak is one thing, quite another is a child who has an imagination, and
who sees the tattered remnants of her cloak whirling in the wheel-spokes
of a post-chaise fiercely driven by strangers on lonesome roads through
a night of storm in which the moon is drowned. She was alone, and,
having to reach the town she belonged to, she got up behind the chaise,
and her cloak was caught in the wheel. And she is fatherless and
motherless, and her poverty (the poem is called Alice Fell, or
Poverty) is so extreme that for the loss of her weather-beaten rag she
does not 'cry'; she weeps loud and bitterly; weeps as if her innocent
heart would break; sits by the stranger who has placed her by his side
and is trying to console her, insensible to all relief; sends forth sob
after sob as if her grief could never, never have an end; checks herself
for a moment to answer a question, and then weeps on as if she had lost
her only friend, and the thought would choke her very heart. It was
this poverty and this grief that Wordsworth described with his
reiterated hammering blows. Is it not pathetic? And to Wordsworth it was
more. To him grief like this is sublime. It is the agony of a soul from
which something is torn away that was made one with its very being. What
does it matter whether the thing is a woman, or a kingdom, or a tattered
cloak? It is the passion that counts. Othello must not agonise for a
cloak, but 'the little orphan Alice Fell' has nothing else to agonise
for. Is all this insignificant? And then--for this poem about a child is
right to the last line--next day the storm and the tragedy have
vanished, and the new cloak is bought, of duffil grey, as warm a cloak
as man can sell; and the child is as pleased as Punch.


2.

I pass on from this subject to another, allied to it, but wider. In
spite of all the excellent criticism of Wordsworth, there has gradually
been formed, I think, in the mind of the general reader a partial and
misleading idea of the poet and his work. This partiality is due to
several causes: for instance, to the fact that personal recollections of
Wordsworth have inevitably been, for the most part, recollections of his
later years; to forgetfulness of his position in the history of
literature, and of the restricted purpose of his first important poems;
and to the insistence of some of his most influential critics, notably
Arnold, on one particular source of his power--an insistence perfectly
just, but accompanied now and then by a lack of sympathy with other
aspects of his poetry. The result is an idea of him which is mainly true
and really characteristic, but yet incomplete, and so, in a sense,
untrue; a picture, I might say, somewhat like Millais' first portrait of
Gladstone, which renders the inspiration, the beauty, the light, but
not the sternness or imperiousness, and not all of the power and fire.
Let me try to express this idea, which, it is needless to say, I do not
attribute, in the shape here given to it, to anyone in particular.

It was not Wordsworth's function to sing, like most great poets, of war,
or love, or tragic passions, or the actions of supernatural beings. His
peculiar function was 'to open out the soul of little and familiar
things,' alike in nature and in human life. His 'poetry is great because
of the extraordinary power with which he feels the joy offered to us in
nature, the joy offered to us in the simple primary affections and
duties.' His field was therefore narrow; and, besides, he was deficient
in romance, his moral sympathies were somewhat limited, and he tended
also to ignore the darker aspects of the world. But in this very
optimism lay his strength. The gulf which for Byron and Shelley yawned
between the real and the ideal, had no existence for him. For him the
ideal was realised, and Utopia a country which he saw every day, and
which, he thought, every man might see who did not strive, nor cry, nor
rebel, but opened his heart in love and thankfulness to sweet influences
as universal and perpetual as the air. The spirit of his poetry was also
that of his life--a life full of strong but peaceful affections; of a
communion with nature in keen but calm and meditative joy; of perfect
devotion to the mission with which he held himself charged; and of a
natural piety gradually assuming a more distinctively religious tone.
Some verses of his own best describe him, and some verses of Matthew
Arnold his influence on his readers. These are his own words (from A
Poet's Epitaph):

But who is he, with modest looks,
And clad in homely russet brown?
He murmurs near the running brooks
A music sweeter than their own.


He is retired as noontide dew,
Or fountain in a noon-day grove;
And you must love him, ere to you
He will seem worthy of your love.

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

In common things that round us lie
Some random truths he can impart,
--The harvest of a quiet eye
That broods and sleeps on his own heart.

But he is weak; both man and boy,
Hath been an idler in the land:
Contented if he might enjoy
The things which others understand.

And these are the words from Arnold's Memorial Verses:

He too upon a wintry clime
Had fallen--on this iron time
Of doubts, disputes, distractions, fears
He found us when the age had bound
Our souls in its benumbing round--
He spoke, and loosed our heart in tears.
He laid us as we lay at birth
On the cool flowery lap of earth;
Smiles broke from us and we had ease.
The hills were round us, and the breeze
Went o'er the sunlit fields again;
Our foreheads felt the wind and rain.
Our youth returned: for there was shed
On spirits that had long been dead,
Spirits dried up and closely furled,
The freshness of the early world.

Ah, since dark days still bring to light
Man's prudence and ma