MR. MORLEY ON WORDSWORTH.

MR. MORLEY'S politics do not use him up or wear him out. He has seldom written anything fresher or more vigorous than the essay on Wordsworth which he has prefixed to Macmillan's new and admirable one-volume edition of the poet,—the only complete edition, as it alone contains "The Recluse," which is now published for the first time. Yet while we heartily admire this admirable introduction, which touches the true Wordsworth at so many points and with so much delicacy, we do not agree with what we understand to be Mr. Morley's view, that it is more as teacher and less as pure poet that Wordsworth is most admirable. For our own parts, wherever Wordsworth becomes didactic, we find his poetry below par. We agree heartily with Matthew Arnold's commentary on the passages from Wordsworth which bald-headed and spectacled educationists pour forth from educational platforms, and almost found it in our hearts to cheer the scornful satire with which Mr. Arnold entreated us to tarn "from these bold, bad men "to the true Wordsworth. We will admit to Mr. Morley that "there are great tracts in Wordsworth which by no definition and on

no terms can be called poetry." We will admit to him that "Wordsworth hardly knows how to be stern as Dante or Milton was stern ; nor has he the note of plangent sadness which strikes the ear in men so morally inferior to him as Rousseau, Keats, Shelley, or Coleridge ; nor has he the Olympian air-with

which Goethe delivered sage oracles." But we cannot admit,—

we strenuously deny,--that "in purely poetic quality" Words- worth is surpassed by men who were below him in weight or greatness. We should say that in genuine "poetic quality,"— though it is genuine poetic quality of a somewhat unique and limited if infinitely lofty kind, and not one which includes either "depth and variety of colour," or "penetrating and subtle sweetness of music,"—Wordsworth is not surpassed

by any English poet who ever lived. It is true, we think, that wherever Wordsworth is greatest, he lifts us into a

world far above our own, and that wherever he is most lamentably dreary, he tries so to lift us, and fails ; but what we vehemently deny is that he succeeds in lifting us into that world above our own by virtue of his didactic impulse, which, indeed, he often tries upon us with no effect but that of repelling instead of exalting us. But in his proper field, we hold that (as Mr. De Vere, himself no mean poet, has main- tained in a very striking essay) Wordsworth's passion is passion of the most genuine kind,—indeed, in our estimation far more exalted than the passion of Byron, or Shelley, or Keats, or Coleridge, or even Burns. But then, its proper field is a field which hardly any poet but himself knows how to enter at all; it introduces us to a sort of fourth dimen- sion in the poetic world, to a previously untravelled region of poetry where .Wordsworth lives almost alone, and nearly every other poet is simply nowhere. Poems like the "Ode to Duty," the "Lines written near Tintern Abbey," "The Cuckoo," "The Daffodils" (" I wandered lonely as a cloud "), "The Affliction of Margaret," and at least fifty others, seem to us to have genuine "poetic quality" of a sort in which Wordsworth has not only no rival, but hardly even a companion. Perhaps there is a piece or two among Henry Vaughan's beautiful poems in which we might say that he indi- cates poetic quality of the same high kind. But where is the highest passion to be found, if it is not to be found in poems such as these of Wordsworth,—passion in its highest and truest sense, in the sense in which it indicates a true rapture, because it means that the poet is carried off his feet by a spirit which at once takes possession of him and exalts him ? Shelley's poetry often expresses the same sense of rapture, but in a much lower region, for while we feel that Shelley is taken possession of by some exquisitely musical passion of sorrow or desire, the rapture does not exalt him, as it exalts Wordsworth, into a sphere far purer and loftier than his own. Every one knows the "Ode to Duty," and every one who is not so definitely hostile to Wordsworth as to be unable to enter into it at all, is struck by it ; but for our own part, we doubt whether there is any rapture expressed in our language quite so exalting as the rapture of the last stanza but one :—

"Stern Lawgiver ! yet thou dost wear

The Godhead's most benignant grace ; Nor know we anything so fair As is the smile upon thy face : Flowers laugh before thee on their beds, And fragrance in thy footing treads : Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong, And the most ancient heavens through thee are fresh and strong."

It is quite true that in Wordsworth's highest strain there is always the note of "volition and self-government," but that indicates the theme rather than the poetic force or movement.

You see that Wordsworth prepared himself for his highest work by offering a strong resistance to the impulses which solicited him, instead of yielding to them as Shelley would have done; but so far he had not even touched the mood of poetry; he had only prepared himself for inspiration by a sort of spiritual initiation of his own. For he well knew that the Muse was most accessible to him in this mood, and that when he had prepared himself by strenuous effort to receive her, she was most likely to lift him to her highest heaven. But it was not the ascetic preparation of heart and will which involved any element of rapture; it was only that with- out this ascetic preparation the rapture never came, or never came in its noblest and loftiest form. If he waited in vain, then he wrote the sort of verse which Mr. Arnold's "bold, bad men" love to pour forth from platforms. But often, at least, he did not wait in vain, and then Wordsworth was able to express as no other English poet has ever been able to express, what Mr. Bagehot so finely described as "the lonely rapture of lonely minds." For though that rapture is in Wordsworth a consequence of volition, it is by no means true that when it comes it usually contains in it even such a "direct appeal to will and conduct" as does the "Ode to Duty."

Take the exquisite poems on "Yarrow Unvisited," "The Solitary Reaper," "Three years she grew in sun and shower," among scores of the same kind, and you will not find a line in any of them which the "bold, bad men" would care to quote, or which would answer the purpose of any one who wanted to make a "direct appeal to will and conduct." How would it answer their pmpose to proclaim to the world the existence of a boy among the woods and islands of Winander of whom it might be truly said that- " with fingers interwoven, both hands Pressed closely palm to palm, and to his mouth

Uplifted, he, as through an instrument,

Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls That they might answer him. And they would shout Across the watery vale, and shout again, Responsive to his call, with quivering peals And long halloos, and screams and echoes loud, Redoubled and redoubled; concourse wild Of jocund din ! And when there came a pause Of silence such as baffled his best skill ; Then sometimes in that silence, while he hung Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise Has carried far into his heart the voice Of mountain torrents ; or the visible scene Would enter unawares into his mind With all its solemn imagery, its rocks, Its woods, and that uncertain heaven received Into the bosom of the steady lake."

What "appeal to will and conduct" could be extracted from that P The "bold, bad men" would probably say that this was a "bold, bad boy," who ought to have been studying the rudiments of political economy or sociology, instead of blowing "mimic hootings to the silent owls that they might answer him ;" and yet, though there is no vestige of an "appeal to will and conduct" in these lines, there is ample evidence in them that they are the offspring of volition and self-government, so far as this, that they flow from a mood born of Wordsworth's "steady resistance to the ebb and flow of ordinary desires and regrets." The "shock of mild sur- prise" that "carried far into his heart the voice of mountain torrents," was a shock of rapture sprung from that vigilant and eager solitude in which the boy severed himself from Nature, in order that he might watch the incoming to his mind of "the voice of mountain torrents," and surprise the solemn imagery that had entered it "unawares," and had yet taken more definite shape within it than even in "the bosom of the steady lake." Or take such a characteristic passage as that in the third book of "The Excursion," where the Solitary, after the loss of his child and wife, describes how-

" By pain of heart—now checked—and now impelled— The intellectual power through words and things Went sounding on, a dim and perilous way."

Here, again, there is nothing that Mr. Arnold's "bold, bad men" would quote, except as a warning ; but no poet except Wordsworth could have written these three lines. They, too, are the offspring of a mood of volition and self-control ; but the grandeur of them is no product of the loom of volition and self-control ; it is due to a rapture of solitude which no voluntary power possesses the spell to summon up. Words- worth had watched his own heart, now checking, now impelling, his intellect, as the latter cast the leads into the deep soundings of human hope and dread, of human endeavour and failure; and the result was these noble lines, which shadow forth the intel- lectual history of many a soul that has been shipwrecked and yet has ultimately reached "the haven where it would be ;" and of many a soul, too, that has been shipwrecked without ultimately reaching that desired haven. Yet passages such as we have quoted and poems such as we have named could have sprung from the genius of no English poet but Words- worth, and could not have sprung from even his mind, in spite of all its careful sweeping and garnishing, had not a spirit and a passion descended upon him for which that sweeping and garnishing were a mere invocation. Mr. Morley finely says that Wordsworth could not command that "note of plangent sadness" which strikes the ear in men morally his inferiors in every way. And that is true, for " planeent sadness" is the sadness conveyed by the idle lapping of the wave, and Wordsworth, even if he sat on "an old grey stone" and seemed to dream his time away, was one who brought with him a heart "that watches and receives,"—that watched hungrily and received gratefully. But though there was no perfect note of "plangent sadness" in Wordsworth, there was a note of a far rarer and higher kind, a triumphant sadness which steadily faces the worst sufferings of humanity, and wins from them a more exalted hope. If he paints, as he often does, "dim sadness and blind thoughts I knew not nor could

name," if he can tell us,— "I thought of Chatt,erton, the marvellous boy,

The sleepless soul that perished in his pride ; Of him who walked in glory and in joy, Following his plough upon the mountain side : By our own spirits are we deified : We Poets in our youth begin in gladness, But thereof come in the end despondency and madness,"

it is not to depict the lapping of any wave of sadness on his

heart, but to show how he can triumph over it, and elicit the sense of human grandeur even from the most desolate of human fates. We cannot at all agree with Mr. Morley that Words- worth "had not rooted in him the sense of Fate, of the inexorable sequences of things, of the terrible chain that so often binds an awful end to some slight and trivial beginning." What does he say to such lines as these ?—

" Amid the groves, under the shadowy hills, The generations are prepared ; the pangs, The internal pangs are ready,—the dread strife Of poor humanity's afflicted will."

But with this sense of fate, Wordsworth had a conviction that in man there is something intended to defy fate, and to wring even from "the inexorable sequences of things," even from "the terrible chain that so often binds the awful end to some light and trivial beginning," a strength greater than the

strength of fate, which fate cannot crush. Wordsworth had convinced himself that even where fate oppresses, it oppresses to show—

"that consolation springs From sources deeper far than deepest pain ;" and he carried about with him the passionate exaltation of that conviction. Mr. Morley is a fine critic, but he seems to us to miss the rapture of Wordsworth, while he sees all his purity and wisdom.