WORDSWORTH.*

MR. WALTER. RALEIGH is one of our few living stylists, in the best sense, and anything he has to say on literature is certain to be said in a manner that will charm even where it does not convince, and will disarm even where it does not

• Wordsworth. By Walter Raleigh. London: Edward Arnold. [Ga.]

conquer by force of logic. Therefore this volume dealing

with so great a poet as Wordsworth is to be welcomed and read with pleasure as well as instruction. To assert that Mr.

Raleigh " doth protest too much " is merely to say that he is a Wordaworthien who is inclined to preach severely to the con-

verted; for, indeed, we are all of his cult to-day. It is suffi- cient to feel that Wordsworth " has taken his rank high among the greatest," to know that he represents a great mountain in the land of literature, without scrutinising too curiously the roughness and apparent meanness of the approach to the spiritual summit. Paradox as it may seem, a man is scarcely a great poet who has not written a. good deal, perhaps much bad verse. But most great poets have had the worldly wisdom to destroy these vestiges of their mortality, these evidences that they, like other men, have trodden un- ashamed the monotonous pathway of routine. The greatest only—Shakespeare and Wordsworth and Goethe, shall we say ?—were content to leave the sum total of their writings, conscious, perhaps, that Time is the only critic of much account, the only final authoriser of canons. Time and her editors have given us a final canon of Euripides, are promising to do-the same for Shakespeare, and doul'tless in the course of centuries will find a means of eradicating the hires that are sown among the Wordswortliian wheat. The great ending to " The Recluse " is perhaps the best criticism by the best con-

temporary critic on the poet's lowlier themes. The poet, who knew himself, knew it was needful for him to pass from high tragedy, from "noble" things, from— "The fierce confederate storm Of sorrow, barricadoed evermore Within the walls of cities "- to lowlier matter :— " If such theme

May sort with highest objects, then, dread Power !

Whose gracious favour is the primal source Of all illununation—may my life Express the image of a better time, More wise desires, and simpler manners ;—nurse My Heart in genuine freedom :—all pure thoughts Be with me ;—so shall thy -unfailing love Guide, and support and cheer me to the end !"

Thus the poet in his lowlier matters strove to pierce in his own way to the heart of things as he imagined it, and so saved his soul alive. The poetry—such as " The Idiot Boy "-

which we, rightly enough, condemn, in spite of, or perhaps because of, its almost passionate defiance of Convention and ber critical apparatus, played an essential part in his spiritual development ; and that development was, in his mind, as essential to his own personal life as, in the critic's judgment,

it was essential to his own immortality as a poet. The differ- ence between Wordsworth and others of his rank is that he has left in view the ladder by which he climbed,—the ladder between earth and the heaven of his immortality. In the light of common day it looks a mere carpenter's contrivance, and so we fail to understand how it was that the poet "took a keen delight in crooning over to himself his least admired compositions."

So much for our own view of the inequalities in the work of this great genius. But apart from this question of the comparative value of different parts of Wor•dsworth's work is the question • of the criticism of that work as a whole,—of the position of that work in the world's literature, and of its place in the lives of men. While the criticism of differentiation between the parts of the work seems to us a vain thing—for a poet stands or falls eventually by his best, while the world forgets the rest—the criticism of the whole is a business that cannot be undertaken too often by competent

hands. We have not had the last word yet on Shakespeare, nor• is this the last word, competent and illuminating as the

criticism is, on Wordsworth. The true critic forges his own implements of criticism. We take it that Mr•. Raleigh insists on this, and we join with him in his epigrammatic protest against the suggestion that Aristotle laid down eternal principles of poetic criticism : "his thoughts turned to the general condi- tions of poetic pleasure, and led him to frame some tentative laws explanatory of his own experiences. He could not fore- see that he was arming every literary dunce in Europe, for many centuries, with weapons of outrage and offence." Mr. Raleigh's own method is one that seems admirably suited for the purpose of fairly appreciating Wordsworth's point of view. "The critic must go back with him to the starting point, and,

by the aid of his own writings and the writings that throw light on his life and purposes, must watch his poems in the making." In this way one may certainly learn, better perhaps than in any other way, the principles of poetry as Words- worth understood and applied them. But we cannot think

such an analysis either necessary or desirable to enable the

reader "to appreciate the most characteristic merits of the poems." If Mr. Raleigh thinks so, we are at issue with him. A poem, a great poem, stands alone. Into it there is woven, no doubt, the innermost life of the poet and the princi- plea that control his conception of poetry. The poem will help us to realise the poet and his poetic principles r-

" Long have I loved what I behold, The night that calms, the day that cheers ; The common growth of mother-earth Suffices me—her tears, her mirth, Her humblest mirth and tears."

Surely here is Wordsworth, here surely are his principles ; the man whose heart was a "fountain of sweet tears," who was-

" Contented if he might enjoy The things which others understand,"—

and who found in solitude impulses. of deeper birth than the outward shows of thilig,s could give him. But to bring canons of interpretation—derive them whence we may—to the poems of 1799 and the few succeeding years of grace is a sacrilege. The lives and environment of poets, " makers," not absolutely in the front rank may be necessary for the interpretation of their works. We may understand Andrea del Sarto's works better because of his life's story, but who needs Raphael's life as an instrument to unravel his work ? We read Byron, Shelley, Keats, in the light of their lives, but not so Shakespeare. Were we compelled to do so, then "the less Shakespeare he." If, then, Wordsworth is in quite the first flight of poets, as we believe he is, it will add nothing to the value of his work to read it by the light of his life. It has, as all immortal work has, its own light, by which it must be read, and that light, we venture to believe,

would not be diminished if the life of William Wordsworth were as deeply hidden from the curiosity of man as is happily

the life of William Shakespeare.

But there is another point of view from which we believe Mr. Raleigh's book has a distinct and abiding value. This full demonstration of the principles of life and literature that are to be derived from Wordsworth's writings and life has a value for the student of literature, for the literary aspirant, for those who are capable of rising through the buoyance of high thoughts, which can scarcely be overrated. If we can but watch Wordsworth's " poems in the making," the vigil may make another great poet. The most instructive period of his life, we cannot doubt, was the Coleridge period. There are some critics who believe—and their belief is certainly not to be dismissed with contempt—that had there been

no Coleridge there would have been no Wordsworth, that Coleridge's influence permeates like a subtle essence all the supremest poems, and that Wordsworth at his highest trans- mutes into the forms we know both the poetry and the philosophy of Coleridge. The "profound mysticism," the " distrust of all rational process," that Mr. Raleigh sees

"beneath all Wordsworth's theory and practice of poetry" may perhaps be traced to that source, the influence of which has been at times over•-estimated, but which Mr. Raleigh certainly under•-estimates :—

" It is a safe conjecture that his friendship with Coleridge quickened his critical powers, and taught him to study the work- ings of his own imagination in a more conscious and detached manner. It may even have encouraged him to advance as explicit doctrine what had value merely as perception, and so to make the Lyrical Ballads seem like a gauntlet flung in the face of public taste. But the chief benefit he received from Coleridge's friend- ship lay, after all, in the strength that comes from early apprecia- tion. To be understood is a rare and peat happiness ; it helped Wordsworth to bear with equanimity many long years of public indifference and ridicule!'

That to Wordsworth Coleridge was more than this it seems difficult to doubt, though the very subtlety of the influence makes proof, and even assertion, hard. Many of the short poems of 1799 contain in their exquisite odour of phrase and thought the most complete evidence of this influence. Coleridge enabled Wordsworth to see Nature with an intenser spiritual eye, and to draw from natural objects those inner meanings which can only be revealed by a mysticism that

neither the earliest nor the latest period of Wordsworth exhibits. We are told that " without other apparatus than introspection and the observation of his fellows, Wordsworth became a psychologist" This psychology, which plays so intense a part in his work, which is so closely allied to " the bare intolerable force " (to use Mr. Raleigh's striking phrase) that Wordsworth shares with Shakespeare, had a relation to the poet's intercourse with Coleridge which is, we think, insufficiently recognised here.

From chapters that all attain so high a standard of analysis it is difficult to choose, but no Wordsworth lovers can afford to miss the second half of this book, the chapters

on "Poetic Diction," "Nature," "Humanity," "Illumination." Mr. Raleigh's selection from Wordsworth at his highest is in itself a gift to lovers of great poetry. When he speaks of the "indissoluble self-possession, as of the mountains, in the poems of his prime," they seem to us finally defined. Of those haunting lines— "A slumber did my spirit seal ; I had no human fears:

She seemed a thing that could not feel The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force ; She neither hears nor sees ;

Rolled round in earth's diurnal course With rocks, and stones, and trees,"—

we are told "here is a unique feat of strength, the achieve- ment of a lifetime." There can be no other description; but Mr. Raleigh might have added the indubitable fact that the spirit of Coleridge unconsciously permeates them through and through. It might be a poem from the "Sibylline Leaves," —" a dream remembered in a dream." Each poet is crying with a single voice :—

" To be beloved is all I need,

And whom I love, I love indeed."

We may conclude this notice of a very notable book with its own conclusion. The poet

"failed, it must be admitted, in many of the things that he attempted; failed more signally and obviously than other great poets who have made a more prudent estimate of human powers and have chosen a task to match their strength. He pressed onward to a point where speech fails and drops into silence, where thought is baffled, and turns back upon its own footsteps. But it is a good discipline to follow that intense and fervent spirit, as far as may be, to the heights that denied him access. There is a certain degradation and pallor which falls on the soul amid the dreary intercourse of daily life,' the heat that is generated by small differences, the poison that is brewed by small suspicions, the burden that is imposed by small cares. To escape from these things into a world of romance is to flee them, and to be defeated by them. Sanity holds hard by the fact, and knows that to turn away from it is to play the recreant. Here was a poet who faced the fact, and against whom the fact did not pre- vail. To know him is to learn courage; to walk with him is to feel the visitings of a larger, purer air, and the peace of an un- fathomable sky."

To have written that is to have understood Wordsworth as few of us are able to understand this man who realised, as only a great poet can, the interaction of transient and eternal things.