Old and New Masters — 06 - Ch.4.i - Wordsworth: 1. His Personality and Genius

1. HIS PERSONALITY AND GENIUS

Dorothy Wordsworth--whom Professor Harper has praised not beyond reason as "the most delightful, the most fascinating woman who has enriched literary history"--once confessed in a letter about her brother William that "his person is not in his favour," and that he was "certainly rather plain."

He is the most difficult of all the great poets whom one reverences to portray as an attractive person.

"'Horse-face,' I have heard satirists say," Carlyle wrote of him, recalling a comparison of Hazlitt's; and the horse-face seems to be symbolic of something that we find not only in his personal appearance, but in his personality and his work.

His faults do not soften us, as the faults of so many favourite writers do.

They were the faults, not of passion, but of a superior person, who was something of a Sir Willoughby Patterne in his pompous self-satisfaction.

"He says," records Lamb in one of his letters, "he does not see much difficulty in writing like Shakespeare, if he had a mind to try it."

Lamb adds: "It is clear that nothing is wanting but the mind."

Leigh Hunt, after receiving a visit from Wordsworth in 1815, remarked that "he was as sceptical on the merit of all kinds of poetry but one as Richardson was on those of the novels of Fielding."

Keats, who had earlier spoken of the reverence in which he held Wordsworth, wrote to his brother in 1818: "I am sorry that Wordsworth has left a bad impression wherever he visited in town by his egotism, vanity, and bigotry."

There was something frigidly unsympathetic in his judgment of others, which was as unattractive as his complacency in regard to his own work.

When Trelawny, seeing him at Lausanne and, learning who he was, went up to him as he was about to step into his carriage and asked him what he thought of Shelley as a poet, he replied: "Nothing."

Again, Wordsworth spoke with solemn reprobation of certain of Lamb's friendships, after Lamb was dead, as "the indulgences of social humours and fancies which were often injurious to himself and causes of severe regrets to his friends, without really benefiting the object of his misapplied kindness."

Nor was this attitude of Johnny Head-in-Air the mark only of his later years.

It appeared in the days when he and Coleridge collaborated in bringing out _Lyrical Ballads.

_ There is something sublimely egotistical in the way in which he shook his head over _The Ancient Mariner_ as a drag upon that miraculous volume.

In the course of a letter to his publisher, he wrote:-- From what I can gather it seems that _The Ancyent Marinere_ has, on the whole, been an injury to the volume; I mean that the old words and the strangeness of it have deterred readers from going on.

If the volume should come to a second edition, I would put in its place some little things which would be more likely to suit the common taste.

It is when one reads sentences like these that one begins to take a mischievous delight in the later onslaught of a Scottish reviewer who, indignant that Wordsworth should dare to pretend to be able to appreciate Burns, denounced him as "a retired, pensive, egotistical, _collector of stamps_," and as-- a melancholy, sighing, half-parson sort of gentleman, who lives in a small circle of old maids and sonneteers, and drinks tea now and then with the solemn Laureate.

One feels at times that no ridicule or abuse of this stiff-necked old fraud could be excessive; for, if he were not Wordsworth, as what but a fraud could we picture him in his later years, as he protests against Catholic Emancipation, the extension of the franchise, the freedom of the Press, and popular education?

"Can it, in a _general_ view," he asks, "be good that an infant should learn much which its _parents do not know?

_ Will not a child arrogate a superiority unfavourable to love and obedience?"

He shuddered again at the likelihood that Mechanics' Institutes would "make discontented spirits and insubordinate and presumptuous workmen."

He opposed the admission of Dissenters to Cambridge University, and he "desired that a medical education should be kept beyond the reach of a poor student," on the ground that "the better able the parents are to incur expense, the stronger pledge have we of their children being above meanness and unfeeling and sordid habits."

One might go on quoting instance after instance of this piety of success, as it might be called.

Time and again the words seem to come from the mouth, not of one of the inspired men of the modern world, but of some puffed-up elderly gentleman in a novel by Jane Austen.

His letter to a young relation who wished to marry his daughter Dora is a letter that Jane Austen might have invented:-- If you have thoughts of marrying, do look out for some lady with a sufficient fortune for both of you.

What I say to you now I would recommend to every naval officer and clergyman who is without prospect of professional advancement.

Ladies of some fortune are as easily won as those without, and for the most part as deserving.

Check the first liking to those who have nothing.

One is tempted to say that Wordsworth, like so many other poets, died young, and that a pensioner who inherited his name survived him.

When one has told the worst about Wordsworth, however, one is as far as ever from having painted a portrait of him in which anybody could believe while reading the _Ode on Intimations of Immortality--Ode_ as it was simply called when it was first published--or _I wandered lonely as a cloud_, or the sonnet composed on Westminster Bridge.

Nor does the portrait of a stern, unbending egotist satisfy us when we remember the life-long devotion that existed between him and Dorothy, and the fact that Coleridge loved him, and that Lamb and Scott were his friends.

He may have been a niggard of warm-heartedness to the outside world, but it is clear from his biography that he possessed the genius of a good heart as well as of a great mind.

And he was as conspicuous for the public as for the private virtues.

His latest biographer has done well to withdraw our eyes from the portrait of the old man with the stiffened joints and to paint in more glowing colours than any of his predecessors the early Wordsworth who rejoiced in the French Revolution, and, apparently as a consequence, initiated a revolution in English poetry.

The later period of the life is not glossed over; it is given, indeed, in cruel detail, and Professor Harper's account of it is the most lively and fascinating part of his admirable book.

But it is to the heart of the young revolutionary, who dreamed of becoming a Girondist leader and of seeing England a republic, that he traces all the genius and understanding that we find in the poems.

"Wordsworth's connection," he writes, "with the English 'Jacobins,' with the most extreme element opposed to the war or actively agitating in favour of making England a republic, was much closer than has been generally admitted."

He points out that Wordsworth's first books of verse, _An Evening Walk_, and _Descriptive Sketches_, were published by Joseph Johnson, who also published Dr. Priestley, Horne Tooke, and Mary Wollstonecraft, and whose shop was frequented by Godwin and Paine.

Professor Harper attempts to strengthen his case by giving brief sketches of famous "Jacobins," whom Wordsworth may or may not have met, but his case is strong enough without their help.

Wordsworth's reply--not published at the time, or, indeed, till after his death--to the Bishop of Llandaff's anti-French-Revolution sermon on _The Wisdom and Goodness of God in having made both Rich and Poor_, was signed without qualification, "By a Republican."

He refused to join in "the idle Cry of modish lamentation" over the execution of the French King, and defended the other executions in France as necessary.

He condemned the hereditary principle, whether in the Monarchy or the House of Lords.

The existence of a nobility, he held, "has a necessary, tendency to dishonour labour."

Had he published this pamphlet when it was written, in 1793, he might easily have found himself in prison, like many other sympathizers with the French.

Wordsworth gives us an idea in _The Prelude_--how one wishes one had the original and unamended version of the poem as it was finished in 1805!

--of the extreme lengths to which his Republican idealism carried him.

When war was declared against France, he tells us, he prayed for French victories, and-- Exulted in the triumph of my soul, When Englishmen by thousands were o'erthrown, Left without glory on the field, or driven, Brave hearts!

to shameful flight.

Two years later we, find him at Racedown planning satires against the King, the Prince of Wales, and various public men, one of the couplets on the King and the Duke of Norfolk running:-- Heavens!

who sees majesty in George's face?

Or looks at Norfolk, and can dream of grace?

But these lines, he declared, were given to him by Southey.

By 1797 a Government spy seems to have been looking after him and his friends: he was living at the time at Alfoxden, near Coleridge, who, in the previous year, had brought out _The Watchman_ to proclaim, as the prospectus said, "the state of the political atmosphere, and preserve Freedom and her Friends from the attacks of Robbers and Assassins."

Wordsworth at a later period did not like the story of the spy, but it is certain that about the time of the visit he got notice to quit Alfoxden, obviously for political reasons, from the lady who owned the estate.

Professor Harper's originality as a biographer, however, does not lie in his narration of facts like these, but in the patience with which he traces the continuance of French sympathies in Wordsworth on into the opening years of the nineteenth century.

He has altered the proportions in the Wordsworth legend, and made the youth of the poet as long in the telling as his age.

This was all the more necessary because various biographers have followed too closely the example of the official _Life_, the materials for which Wordsworth entrusted to his nephew, the Bishop, who naturally regarded Wordsworth, the pillar of Church and State, as a more eminent and laudable figure than Wordsworth, the young Revolutionary.

Whether the Bishop deliberately hushed up the fact that, during his early travels in France, Wordsworth fell in love with an aristocratic French lady who bore him an illegitimate child, I do not know.

Professor Harper, taking a more ruthless view of the duties of a biographer, now relates the story, though in a rather vague and mysterious way.

One wishes that, having told us so much, he had told us a little more.

Even with all we know about the early life of Wordsworth, we are still left guessing at his portrait rather than with a clear idea of it.

He was a figure in his youth, a character in his old age.

The character we know down to the roots of his hair.

But the figure remains something of a secret.

As a poet, Wordsworth may almost be called the first of the democrats.

He brought into literature a fresh vision--a vision bathing the world and its inhabitants in a strange and revolutionary light.

He was the first great poet of equality and fraternity in the sense that he portrayed the lives of common country, people in their daily surroundings as faithfully as though they had been kings.

It would be absurd to suggest that there are no anticipations of this democratic spirit in English literature from Chaucer down to Burns, but Wordsworth, more than any other English writer, deserves the credit of having emancipated the poor man into being a fit subject for noble poetry.

How revolutionary a change this was it is difficult to realize at the present day, but Jeffrey's protest against it in the _Edinburgh Review_ in 1802 enables one to realize to what a degree the poor man was regarded as an outcast from literature when Wordsworth was young.

In the course of an attack on _Lyrical Ballads_ Jeffrey wrote:-- The love, or grief, or indignation, of an enlightened and refined character is not only expressed in a different language, but is in itself a different emotion from the love, or grief, or anger, of a clown, a tradesman, or a market-wench.

The things themselves are radically and obviously distinct....

The poor and vulgar may interest us, in poetry, by their _situation_; but never, we apprehend, by any sentiments that are peculiar to their condition, and still less by any language that is peculiar to it.

When one takes sides with Wordsworth against Jeffrey on this matter it is not because one regards Wordsworth as a portrait-painter without faults.

His portraits are marred in several cases by the intrusion of his own personality with its "My good man" and "My little man" air.

His human beings have a way of becoming either lifeless or absurd when they talk.

_The Leech-Gatherer_ and _The Idiot Boy_ are not the only poems of Wordsworth that are injured by the insertion of banal dialogue.

It is as though there were, despite his passion for liberty, equality, and fraternity, a certain gaucherie in his relations with other human beings, and he were at his happiest as a solitary.

His nature, we may grant, was of mixed aspects, but, even as early as the 1807 _Poems in Two Volumes_ had he not expressed his impatience of human society in a sonnet?

-- I am not one who much or oft delight To season my fireside with personal talk-- Of friends, who live within an easy walk, Or neighbours, daily, weekly, in _my_ sight: And, for my chance-acquaintance, ladies bright, Sons, mothers, maidens withering on the stalk, These all wear out of me, like forms, with chalk Painted on rich men's floors, for one feast-night.

Better than such discourse doth silence long, Long, barren silence, square with my desire;

To sit without emotion, hope, or aim, In the loved presence of my cottage fire, And listen to the flapping of the flame, Or kettle whispering its faint undersong.

With Wordsworth, indeed, the light of revelation did not fall upon human beings so unbrokenly as upon the face of the earth.

He knew the birds of the countryside better than the old men, and the flowers far better than the children.

He noticed how light plays like a spirit upon all living things.

He heard every field and valley echoing with new songs.

He saw the daffodils dancing by the lake, the green linnet dancing among the hazel leaves, and the young lambs bounding, as he says in an unexpected line, "as to the tabor's sound," and his heart danced to the same music, like the heart of a mystic caught up in holy rapture.

Here rather than in men did he discover the divine speech.

His vision of men was always troubled by his consciousness of duties.

Nature came to him as a liberator into spiritual existence.

Not that he ceased to be a philosopher in his reveries.

He was never the half-sensual kind of mystic.

He was never a sensualist in anything, indeed.

It is significant that he had little sense of smell--the most sensual of the senses.

It is, perhaps, because of this that he is comparatively so roseless a poet.

But what an ear he had, what a harvesting eye!

One cannot read _The Prelude_ or _The Ode_ or _Tintern Abbey_ without feeling that seldom can there have been a poet with a more exquisite capacity for the enjoyment of joyous things.

In his profounder moments he reaches the very sources of joy as few poets have done.

He attracts many readers like a prospect of cleansing and healing streams.

And he succeeds in being a great poet in two manners.

He is a great poet in the grand tradition of English literature, and he is a great poet in his revolutionary simplicity.

_The Idiot Boy_, for all its banalities, is as immortal as _The Ode_, and _The Solitary Reaper_ will live side by side with the great sonnets while the love of literature endures.

While we read these poems we tell ourselves that it is almost irrelevant to mourn the fact that the man who wrote them gave up his faith in humanity for faith in Church and State.

His genius survives in literature: it was only his courage as a politician that perished.

At the same time, he wished to impress himself upon the world as a politician even more perhaps than as a poet.

And, indeed, if he had died at the age at which Byron died, his record in politics would have been as noble as his record in poetry.

Happily or unhappily, however, he lived on, a worse politician and a worse poet.

His record as both has never before been set forth with the same comprehensiveness as in Professor Harper's important and, after one has ploughed through some heavy pages, fascinating volumes.