Delphi Complete Works of William Wordsworth

by William Wordsworth

  It may be added that both in doctrine and practice Wordsworth exhibits a progressive reaction from the extreme views with which he starts towards the common vein of good sense and sound judgment which may be traced back to Horace, Longinus, and Aristotle. His first preface is violently polemic. He attacks with reason that conception of the sublime and beautiful which is represented by Dryden’s picture of “Cortes alone in his nightgown,” remarking that “the mountains seem to nod their drowsy heads.” But the only example of true poetry which he sees fit to adduce in contrast consists in a stanza from the Babes in the Wood. In his preface of 1815 he is not less severe on false sentiment and false observation. But his views of the complexity and dignity of poetry have been much developed, and he is willing now to draw his favourable instances from Shakespeare, Milton, Virgil, and himself.

  His own practice underwent a corresponding change. It is only to a few poems of his earlier years that the famous parody of the Rejected Addresses fairly applies.

  My father’s walls are made of brick,

  But not so tall and not so thick

  As these; and goodness me!

  My father’s beams are made of wood,

  But never, never half so good

  As those that now I see!

  Lines something like these might have occurred in The Thorn or The Idiot Boy. Nothing could be more different from the style of the sonnets, or of the Ode to Duty, or of Laodamia. And yet both the simplicity of the earlier and the pomp of the later poems were almost always noble; nor is the transition from the one style to the other a perplexing or abnormal thing. For all sincere styles are congruous to one another, whether they be adorned or no, as all high natures are congruous to one another, whether in the garb of peasant or of prince. What is incongruous to both is affectation, vulgarity, egoism; and while the noble style can be interchangeably childlike or magnificent, as its theme requires, the ignoble can neither simplify itself into purity nor deck itself into grandeur.

  It need not, therefore, surprise us to find the classical models becoming more and more dominant in Wordsworth’s mind, till the poet of Poor Susan and The Cuckoo spends months over the attempt to translate the Æneid, — to win the secret of that style which he placed at the head of all poetic styles, and of those verses which “wind,” as he says, “with the majesty of the Conscript Fathers entering the Senate-house in solemn procession,” and envelope in their imperial melancholy all the sorrows and the fates of man.

  And, indeed, so tranquil and uniform was the life which we are now retracing, and at the same time so receptive of any noble influence which opportunity might bring, that a real epoch is marked in Wordsworth’s poetical career by the mere re-reading of some Latin authors in 1814-16 with a view to preparing his eldest son for the University. Among the poets whom he thus studied was one in whom he might seem to discern his own spirit endowed with grander proportions, and meditating on sadder fates. Among the poets of the battlefield, of the study, of the boudoir, he encountered the first Priest of Nature, the first poet in Europe who had deliberately shunned the life of courts and cities for the mere joy in Nature’s presence, for “sweet Parthenope and the fields beside Vesevus’ hill.”

  There are, indeed, passages in the Georgics so Wordsworthian, as we now call it, in tone, that it is hard to realize what centuries separated them from the Sonnet to Lady Beaumont or from Ruth. Such, for instance, is the picture of the Corycian old man, who had made himself independent of the seasons by his gardening skill, so that “when gloomy winter was still rending the stones with frost, still curbing with ice the rivers’ onward flow, he even then was plucking the soft hyacinth’s bloom, and chid the tardy summer and delaying airs of spring.” Such, again, is the passage where the poet breaks from the glories of successful industry into the delight of watching the great processes which nature accomplishes untutored and alone, “the joy of gazing on Cytorus waving with boxwood, and on forests of Narycian pine, on tracts that never felt the harrow, nor knew the care of man.”

  Such thoughts as these the Roman and the English poet had in common; — the heritage of untarnished souls.

  I asked; ‘twas whispered; The device

  To each and all might well belong:

  It is the Spirit of Paradise

  That prompts such work, a Spirit strong,

  That gives to all the self-same bent

  Where life is wise and innocent.

  It is not only in tenderness but in dignity that the “wise and innocent” are wont to be at one. Strong in tranquillity, they can intervene amid great emotions with a master’s voice, and project on the storm of passion the clear light of their unchanging calm. And thus it was that the study of Virgil, and especially of Virgil’s solemn picture of the Underworld, prompted in Wordsworth’s mind the most majestic of his poems, his one great utterance on heroic love.

  He had as yet written little on any such topic as this. At Goslar he had composed the poems on Lucy to which allusion has already been made. And after his happy marriage he had painted in one of the best known of his poems the sweet transitions of wedded love, as it moves on from the first shock and agitation of the encounter of predestined souls through all tendernesses of intimate affection into a pervading permanency and calm.

  Scattered, moreover, throughout his poems are several passages in which the passion is treated with similar force and truth. The poem which begins “‘Tis said that some have died for love” depicts the enduring poignancy of bereavement with an “iron pathos” that is almost too strong for art. And something of the same power of clinging attachment is shown in the sonnet where the poet is stung with the thought that “even for the least division of an hour” he has taken pleasure in the life around him, without the accustomed tacit reference to one who has passed away. There is a brighter touch of constancy in that other sonnet where, after letting his fancy play over a glad imaginary past, he turns to his wife, ashamed that even in so vague a vision he could have shaped for himself a solitary joy.

  Let her be comprehended in the frame

  Of these Illusions, or they please no more.

  In later years the two sonnets on his wife’s picture set on that love the consecration of faithful age; and there are those who can recall his look as he gazed on the picture and tried to recognize in that aged face the Beloved who to him was ever young and fair, — a look as of one dwelling in life-long affections with the unquestioning single-heartedness of a child.

  And here it might have been thought that as his experience ended his power of description would have ended too. But it was not so. Under the powerful stimulus of the sixth Æneid — allusions to which pervade Laodamia throughout — with unusual labour, and by a strenuous effort of the imagination, Wordsworth was enabled to depict his own love in excelsis, to imagine what aspect it might have worn, if it had been its destiny to deny itself at some heroic call, and to confront with nobleness an extreme emergency, and to be victor (as Plato has it) in an Olympian contest of the soul. For, indeed, the “fervent, not ungovernable, love,” which is the ideal that Protesilaus is sent to teach, is on a great scale the same affection which we have been considering in domesticity and peace; it is love considered not as a revolution but as a consummation; as a self-abandonment not to a laxer but to a sterner law; no longer as an invasive passion, but as the deliberate habit of the soul. It is that conception of love which springs into being in the last canto of Dante’s Purgatory, — which finds in English chivalry a noble voice, —

  I could not love thee, dear, so much,

  Loved I not honour more.

  [Footnote 5: Laodamia should be read (as it is given in Mr. Matthew Arnold’s admirable volume of selections) with the earlier conclusion: the second form is less satisfactory, and the third, with its sermonizing tone, “thus all in vain exhorted and reproved,” is worst of all.]

  For, indeed, (even as Plato says that Beauty is the splendour of Truth,) so such a Love as this is the splendour of Virtue; it is the unexpected
spark that flashes from self-forgetful soul to soul, it is man’s standing evidence that he “must lose himself to find himself,” and that only when the veil of his personality has lifted from around him can he recognize that he is already in heaven.

  In a second poem inspired by this revived study of classical antiquity Wordsworth has traced the career of Dion, — the worthy pupil of Plato, the philosophic ruler of Syracuse, who allowed himself to shed blood unjustly, though for the public good, and was haunted by a spectre symbolical of this fatal error. At last Dion was assassinated, and the words in which the poet tells his fate seem to me to breathe the very triumph of philosophy, to paint with a touch the greatness of a spirit which makes of Death himself a deliverer, and has its strength in the unseen.

  So were the hopeless troubles, that involved

  The soul of Dion, instantly dissolved.

  I can only compare these lines to that famous passage of Sophocles where the lamentations of the dying Oedipus are interrupted by the impatient summons of an unseen accompanying god. In both places the effect is the same; to present to us with striking brevity the contrast between the visible and the invisible presences that may stand about a man’s last hour; for he may feel with the desolate Oedipus that “all I am has perished” — he may sink like Dion through inextricable sadness to a disastrous death, and then in a moment the transitory shall disappear and the essential shall be made plain, and from Dioa’s upright spirit the perplexities shall vanish away, and Oedipus, in the welcome of that unknown companionship, shall find his expiations over and his reward begun.

  It is true, no doubt, that when Wordsworth wrote these poems he had lost something of the young inimitable charm which fills such pieces as the Fountain or the Solitary Reaper. His language is majestic, but it is no longer magical. And yet we cannot but feel that he has put into these poems something which he could not have put into the poems which preceded them; that they bear the impress of a soul which has added moral effort to poetic inspiration, and is mistress now of the acquired as well as of the innate virtue. For it is words like these that are the strength and stay of men; nor can their accent of lofty earnestness be simulated by the writer’s art. Literary skill may deceive the reader who seeks a literary pleasure alone; and he to whom these strong consolations are a mere imaginative luxury may be uncertain or indifferent out of what heart they come. But those who need them know; spirits that hunger after righteousness discern their proper food; there is no fear lest they confound the sentimental and superficial with those weighty utterances of moral truth which are the most precious legacy that a man can leave to mankind.

  Thus far, then, I must hold that although much of grace had already vanished there was on the whole a progress and elevation in the mind of him of whom we treat. But the culminating point is here. After this — whatever ripening process may have been at work unseen — what is chiefly visible is the slow stiffening of the imaginative power, the slow withdrawal of the insight into the soul of things, and a descent — [Greek: ablaechros mala tsios] — ”soft as soft can be,” to the euthanasy of a death that was like sleep.

  The impression produced by Wordsworth’s reperusal of Virgil in 1814-16 was a deep and lasting one. In 1829-30 he devoted much time and labour to a translation of the first three books of the Æneid, and it is interesting to note the gradual modification of his views as to the true method of rendering poetry.

  “I have long been persuaded,” he writes to Lord Lonsdale in 1829, “that Milton formed his blank verse upon the model of the Georgics and the Æneid, and I am so much struck with this resemblance, that I should, have attempted Virgil in blank verse, had I not been persuaded that no ancient author can with advantage be so rendered. Their religion, their warfare, their course of action and feeling, are too remote from modern interest to allow it. We require every possible help and attraction of sound in our language to smooth the way for the admission of things so remote from our present concerns. My own notion of translation is, that it cannot be too literal, provided these faults be avoided: baldness, in which I include all that takes from dignity; and strangeness, or uncouthness, including harshness; and lastly, attempts to convey meanings which, as they cannot be given but by languid circumlocutions, cannot in fact be said to be given at all…. I feel it, however, to be too probable that my translation is deficient in ornament, because I must unavoidably have lost many of Virgil’s, and have never without reluctance attempted a compensation of my own.”

  The truth of this last self-criticism is very apparent from the fragments of the translation which were published in the Philological Museum; and Coleridge, to whom the whole manuscript was submitted, justly complains of finding “page after page without a single brilliant note;” and adds, “Finally, my conviction is that you undertake an impossibility, and that there is no medium between a pure version and one on the avowed principle of compensation in the widest sense, i.e. manner, genius, total effect; I confine myself to Virgil when I say this.” And it appears that Wordsworth himself came round to this view, for in reluctantly sending a specimen of his work to the Philological Museum in 1832, he says, —

  “Having been displeased in modern translations with the additions of incongruous matter, I began to translate with a resolve to keep clear of that fault by adding nothing; but I became convinced that a spirited translation can scarcely be accomplished in the English language without admitting a principle of compensation.”

  There is a curious analogy between the experiences of Cowper and Wordsworth in the way of translation. Wordsworth’s translation of Virgil was prompted by the same kind of reaction against the reckless laxity of Dryden as that which inspired Cowper against the distorting artificiality of Pope. In each case the new translator cared more for his author and took a much higher view of a translator’s duty than his predecessor had done. But in each case the plain and accurate translation was a failure, while the loose and ornate one continued to be admired. We need not conclude from this that the wilful inaccuracy of Pope or Dryden would be any longer excusable in such a work. But on the other hand we may certainly feel that nothing is gained by rendering an ancient poet into verse at all unless that verse be of a quality to give a pleasure independent of the faithfulness of the translation which it conveys.

  The translations and Laodamia are not the only indications of the influence which Virgil exercised over Wordsworth. Whether from mere similarity of feeling, or from more or less conscious recollection, there are frequent passages in the English which recall the Roman poet. Who can hear Wordsworth describe how a poet on the island in Grasmere

  At noon

  Spreads out his limbs, while, yet unshorn, the sheep,

  Panting beneath the burthen of their wool

  Lie round him, even as if they were a part

  Of his own household: —

  and not think of the stately tenderness of Virgil’s

  Stant et oves circum; nostri nee poenitet illas —

  and the flocks of Arcady that gather round in sympathy with the lovelorn Gallus’ woe?

  So again the well-known lines —

  Not seldom, clad in radiant vest,

  Deceitfully goes forth the Morn;

  Not seldom Evening in the west

  Sinks smilingly forsworn, —

  are almost a translation of Palinurus’ remonstrance with “the treachery of tranquil heaven.” And when the poet wishes for any link which could bind him closer to the Highland maiden who has flitted across his path as a being of a different world from his own: —

  Thine elder Brother would I be,

  Thy Father, anything to thee! —

  we hear the echo of the sadder plaint —

  Atque utinam e vobis unus —

  when the Roman statesman longs to be made one with the simple life of shepherd or husbandman, and to know their undistracted joy.

  Still more impressive is the shock of surprise with which we read in

  Wordsworth’s poem on Ossian the following
lines: —

  Musæus, stationed with his lyre

  Supreme among the Elysian quire,

  Is, for the dwellers upon earth,

  Mute as a lark ere morning’s birth,

  and perceive that he who wrote them has entered — where no commentator could conduct him — into the solemn pathos of Virgil’s Musaeum ante omnis — ; where the singer whose very existence upon earth has become a legend and a mythic name is seen keeping in the underworld his old pre-eminence, and towering above the blessed dead.

  This is a stage in Wordsworth’s career on which his biographer is tempted unduly to linger. For we have reached the Indian summer of his genius; it can still shine at moments bright as ever, and with even a new majesty and calm; but we feel, nevertheless, that the melody is dying from his song; that he is hardening into self-repetition, into rhetoric, into sermonizing common-place, and is rigid where he was once profound. The Thanksgiving Ode (1816) strikes death to the heart. The accustomed patriotic sentiments — the accustomed virtuous aspirations — these are still there; but the accent is like that of a ghost who calls to us in hollow mimicry of a voice that once we loved.

  And yet Wordsworth’s poetic life was not to close without a great symbolical spectacle, a solemn farewell. Sunset among the Cumbrian hills, often of remarkable beauty, once or twice, perhaps, in a score of years, reaches a pitch of illusion and magnificence which indeed seems nothing less than the commingling of earth and heaven. Such a sight — seen from Rydal Mount in 1818 — afforded once more the needed stimulus, and evoked that “Evening Ode, composed on an evening of extraordinary splendour and beauty,” which is the last considerable production of Wordsworth’s genius. In this ode we recognize the peculiar gift of reproducing with magical simplicity as it were the inmost virtue of natural phenomena.