WORDSWORTHIANA.* This is a very agreeable record of a Society

which had the modesty to think that a short lease of existence might suit some kinds of composite literary bodies better than even an aspiration after immortality,—an aspiration which, besides being sure not to get itself realised, is very apt to give birth to a great deal of literary twaddle in the vain attempt to get itself realised. Professor Knight (who was, as Matthew Arnold in his presidential address truly said, rather the author of the Society's being, than its honorary secretary merely) says that it lived for seven years. But the Professor's arithmetic seems a little faulty, or perhaps his interest in the Society made six years swell in his imagination into seven years, for he tells us that it was founded on September 29th, 1880, and that it was dissolved at the summer meeting in 1886 over which Lord Selborne presided ; and we doubt whether any arithmetic can make that period account for even the full age of six years. Yet, very wisely, Professor Knight has not published all that the Society produced even in that comparatively short time. One of the best papers ever communicated to it,—Mr. Aubrey De Vere's on "The Power and Passion of Wordsworth,"—has, we believe, been reproduced in Mr. De Vere's own essays, and that, no doubt, will account for its not appearing here. And for a similar reason, some of Professor Knight's own valuable papers have not been republished here. But there is plenty both to amuse and to charm the reader. There is Matthew Arnold's address to the Society in 1883; there is Mr. Lowell's address to it in 1884; there is Lord Houghton's address in 1885; and there is Lord Selborne's in 1886,—all of them well worth permanent record. There is the valuable paper by Professor Knight on the various portraits of Wordsworth; there is the very entertaining paper by Mr. Rawnsley on the reminiscences of Wordsworth which are still to be heard among the Westmoreland peasantry ; there are two charming papers by Mr. Ainger, one on "Words- worth and Charles Lamb," and the other on "The Poets who Helped to Form Wordsworth's Style ; " and there is a very fascinating paper on "Wordsworth and Turner" by Mr. Harry Goodwin ; finally, there are several other papers which will attract many readers, like Mr. Shorthouse's on "The Platonism of Wordsworth," Mr. Aubrey De Vere's on "The Personal Character of Wordsworth's Poetry," and Mr. Heard's on " Wordsworth's Treatment of Sound." Altogether, it would be difficult to find a more attractive volume of miscellaneous studies of Wordsworth from very different points of view.

Nothing is more remarkable in Mr. Rawnsley's very entertaining paper on the reminiscences of Wordsworth which are still extant among the Westmoreland peasantry, than the emphasis with which they insist on preferring other intimates of Wordsworth, marked by more noticeable and picturesque traits, to the poet himself. Several of them in- sisted that Hartley Coleridge, "little Hartley," as they fondly galled him, was much the more noticeable man of the two ; another has an impressive story of Wilson (Christopher North), whose shoeless walk with Wordsworth was evidently regarded as reflecting more splendour on Wordsworth than Wordsworth could ever have reflected on Wilson ; and others, again, thought that Wordsworth's sister Dorothy was respon- sible for a much larger share of Wordsworth's fame than

• Wordstoorthiana a Selection from Papers Bead to the Wordsworth Society. Edited by William Knight. London; Macmillan and (Jo.

he himself could have generated. To the Westmoreland peasantry, Wordsworth appeared a homely man, not par- ticularly fond of the mountain-side,—they all insist that he was very little of a mountaineer, and much preferred the roads for his long walks,—extremely reserved, who went, roaming about, repeating to himself his own verses, and not.

willingly making friends of any one but his sister Dorothy,. Hartley Coleridge, and John Wilson. Even when he took a.

walk with his family, he separated himself from them to mutter to himself ; and it is evident that the Westmore- land peasantry thought him distant and comparatively un-

interesting, though they had a considerable respect for his independence and uprightness and for his strange love of nocturnal rambles. Here is the reminiscence of an old and now blind man, who lived "as page or butler's assistant at Rydal Mount ":—

" 'Mr. Wudsworth was a plain-faced man, and a mean liver.' The description, as I hinted in the preface, would have staggered a philo-Wordsworthian unaccustomed to the native dialect. But he was a good master and a kind man ; and as for Mrs. Wudsworth, she was a downright clever woman, as kep' accounts, and was a reg'lar manasher. He never knoved, bless ye, what he had, nor- what he was worth, nor whether there was owt to eat in the house,. never.'—' But you say,' I interposed, that he didn't care much whether there was or was not food in the house.'—' Nay, nay,

Wudsworth was a man as was fond of a good dinner at times, if you could get him to it, that was t' job ; not but what he was a

very temperate man i' all things, very, but they was all on 'em

mean livers, and in a plain way. It was porridge for breakfast, and a bit of mutton to dinner, and porridge at night, with a bit of cheese, happen, to end up You said it was hard to get him

to his meals : what did you mean?' I asked.—' Weel, wed, it was study as was his delight : he was a' for study ; and Mrs. Wudsworth would say, "Ring the bell," but he wouldn't stir, bless ye. "Goa. and see what he's doing," she'd say, and we go up to study door and hear him a mumbling and bumming through it. "Dinner's ready, sir," I'd ca' out, but he'd go mumbling on like a deaf man, ya see. And sumtimes Mrs. Wudsworth 'ud say, "Goa and break a bottle, or let a dish fall just outside door in passage." Eh dear, that mostly 'ud bring him out, would that. It was only that as wud, however. For ye kna he was a very careful mon, and he couldn't do with brekking the china.'—' And was he continually at study indoors, or did he rise early, go out for a walk before breakfast, and study, as I have heard, mostly in the open air ?' I asked.—My friend answered at once. He was always at it, ye kna, but it was nowt but what he liked, and not much desk work except when he had a mind to it. Noa, noa, he was quite a open- air man, was Wudsworth: studied a deal upo' the roads. He wasn't partic'lar fond of gitten up early, but did a deal of study after breakfast, and a deal after tea. Walked the roads after dark, he would, a deal, between his tea and supper, and efter. Not a very conversable man, a mumblin' and stoppin', and seem' nowt nor nobody.'—' And what were his favourite roads?' I asked, in an innocent way.—' Well, he was very partial to going up to Tarn Foot in Easedale, and was fondest o' walking by Red Bank and round by Barber's (the late Miss Agar's house), or else t'other way about and home by Clappersgate and Brankers, under Lough- rigg. Never was nowt of a mountaineer, and Miss Dorothy 'companied him. Eh dear, many time I've watched him coming round wi' lantern and her after a walk by night. You've heard tell of Miss Dorothy, happen. Well, folks said she was cleverest mon of the two at his job, and he allays went to her when he was puzzelt. Dorothy had the wits, tho' she went wrang, ye 'ma.'

'But surely,' I said, 'he had some particular cottage or

farm where he would go and have a crack.'—' Naay, naay. He would go times or two to farm Dungeon Ghyll way, but he wasn't

a man for friends. He had some, neah doubt, in his walk of life ; he was ter'ble friends with the Doctor (Arnold) and Muster Southey, and Wilson of Elleray and Hartley Coleridge. Fse seen him many a time taking him out arm i' arm for a talking. But he was specially friendly with Professor. I mind one time when we was driving, me and Mrs. Wudsworth and Miss Wudsworth, to Kendal, and Professor Wilson was superintending making o' a. bye-road up by Elleray there, and he was in his slippers. Nowt wud do but Wudsworth must git down and fall to talkin', and we went on ; but he didn't come, and Mrs. Wudsworth said, "Ye mun drive on ; he'll pick us up at Kendal : no knowing what's got him, now Professor is wi"im." Well, well, she was right. For after putting up at Kendal, who should walk in but Wudsworth and Professor wi'out ony shoes to his feet neiither, for Wilson was in his slippers, and 'ad walk'd hisself to his stockin' feet, and left best part of his stockin' on road an' a' far enuff before they got to Kendal.'"

That is not too honorific on the part of the Westmoreland peasantry. But it is not only the Westmoreland peasantry who seem compelled to depreciate Wordsworth even while they are explaining how remarkable he was. Several of the Presidents of the Society discharged the office of "candid friend" rather than that of panegyrist, and assuredly made more admissions to Wordsworth's foes than were ever yet made by partisans. Mr. Russell Lowell concedes frankly that he has played the part of advocatus diaboli in relation to Wordsworth. And. we may add that it would be difficult to play the part of advocatus diaboli better, or with more chance of succeeding in

depriving Wordsworth of the beatification which the Society probably desired to bestow. The following, for instance, is true enough, yet it is not nearly so often true as Mr. Russell Lowell would have us believe :—

"Even as a teacher he is often too much of a pedagogue, and is apt to forget that poetry instructs not by precept and inculcation, but by hints, and indirections and suggestions, by inducing a mood rather than by enforcing a principle or a moral. He some- times impresses our fancy with the image of a schoolmaster whose classroom commands an unrivalled prospect of cloud and mountain, of all the pomp and prodigality of heaven and earth. From time to time he calls his pupils to the window, and makes them see what without the finer intuition of his eyes they had never seen, makes them feel what, without the sympathy of his more penetrating sentiment, they had never felt. It seems the revelation of a new heaven and a new earth, and to contain in itself its own justifica- tion. Then suddenly recollecting his duty, he shuts the window, calls them back to their tasks, and is equally well pleased and more discursive in enforcing on them the truth that the moral of all this is that in order to be happy they must be virtuous. If the total absence of any sense of humour had the advantage sometimes of making Wordsworth sublimely unconscious, it quite as often made him so to his loss."

We say it is not nearly so often true as Mr. Russell Lowell would have us believe, because he actually suggests that it is only when we judge Wordsworth by a dozen single poems of his noblest kind, that we should declare him "not only a great poet, but among the greatest." Substitute fifty or sixty for the dozen, and Mr. Lowell would have been nearer the mark. And probably even that number is too small But it is no discredit to a Society to show that it is not afraid of the advocatus diaboli, and there will be found in this volume quite enough to rectify any slight injustice which some of the papers contain. One of the most valuable contributions is Mr. Ainger's second paper on those predecessors of Wordsworth from whom he may be said to have formed his style, for while nothing could illustrate better the vast service which Words- worth rendered to modern poetry than that paper, nothing will show more conclusively that he had some real literary ancestors, and was not a mere prodigy of poetic nature. What could be more effective or truer than the following criticism of Mr. Ainger's ?- "There is no doubt whatever as to what he [Wordsworth] meant when he denounced that poetic phraseology which for nearly a hundred years had cramped and hindered the develop- ment of true poetic insight in the verse-writers of England. From the time of Pope, those who passed for poets in England, with some eminent and noteworthy exceptions, had gone on copying, not from Nature, but from one another. It is remarkable,' writes Wordsworth in one of the Prefaces just referred to, that, ex- cepting the Nocturnal Reverie of Lady Winchilsea, and a passage or two in the Windsor Forest of Pope, the poetry of the period intervening between the publication of the Paradise Lost and the Seasons does not contain a single new image of external nature ; and scarcely presents a familiar one from which it can be inferred that the eye of the Poet had been steadily fixed upon his object, much less that his feelings had urged him to work upon it in the spirit of genuine imagination.' Well, this assertion perhaps par- takes of the exaggeration that too often marks Wordsworth's language in speaking of his predecessors, but we cannot deny that it is substantially true. And the practice thus described—of not looking at Nature with their own eyes, but of borrowing the aspects of Nature (or what were supposed to be such) from one another—this practice was of course at the root of that conven- tional language, that poetic diction,' which by Wordsworth's day had become vapid and nauseous beyond bearing. This was in- evitable. As long as Nature is not watched and noted at first- hand, it is clear that the same words, epithets, and phrases will serve over and over again to describe her. Just reflect what this poetic diction' really was. Even from men of genuine poetic sensibility, even from Goldsmith, and Gray, and Thomson, we might compile a complete vocabulary or glossary of this poetic language. Out of this 'poetic diction' we might construct a poetic dictionary. Let us recall a few of such stereotyped words and phrases. In the poets I have in mind a girl is a nymph, and her lover a swain; a poet is a bard ; a traveller always a pilgrim ; the air in motion is the gale ; a wood is a grove; birds are songsters or the feathered choir; any distant view in the country is the land- scape ; a country house is a bower; a person living alone always a hermit, and so forth ; and a list of the poetic epithets that occur over and over again, such as odorous,' and vernal,' and 'purling' could be indefinitely extended. This was what constituted, in fact, the stock-in-trade, the capital of any ingenious wit or eminent hand' who set up as poet; and the strong family like- ness among those writers, under the circumstances is not to be wondered at. Most of the minor verse of the eighteenth century consisted ringing the changes' upon these substantives and adjectives, and many others like unto them. And the secret (a very open one) of this poetic style is certainly the direct antithesis of Wordsworth's. For it lay in not using for poetic purposes the language of every day. It lay in not calling a tree a tree, a field a field, a wind a wind—in fact, in not calling a spade a spade."

Mr. Ainger might have added that Cowper was one of those who prepared the way for Wordsworth. It is true that

Cowper was not unfrequently guilty of the use of the technical poetical phraseology which did so much to spoil the poetry of the eighteenth century. He tells us, for instance, in one of his simplest and most artless pieces, that his dog 'Beau' was pre- sented to him by" two nymphs adorned with every grace," where the word " nymphs " is as much out of place as it would be if applied to Ruth in the Old Testament Still, Cowper, though he could not disembarrass himself of all the old technical phraseology of the eighteenth-century poetry, introduced an easy and limpid simplicity of his own,—now pathetic in its heartfelt despondency, now airy in its humorous prattle,— which must have rendered Wordsworth's revolutionary work twice as easy as it otherwise would have been.

The world has reason to thank Professor Knight very heartily for this entertaining as well as instructiVe volume.