THE PRELUDE

WE serene and happy people who believe The Prelude to be of the fullest importance to English literature welcome Professor de Selineourt's book. It is a work that needs no praise, so impressive is it, so rightly proportioned in its sanity, and so enthusiastic in its detail. Its perfection will give joy_to many a grateful reader.

Mr. de Selincourt has worked from the five almost complete extant manuscripts of the poem scribed at various periods during the years 1805-39. Upon this study he has superimposed a minute examination' of the several notebooks and other manuscripts, some eight in all, containing drafts of portions of the poem. Those who know the difficulties of deciphering Wordsworth's diseased handwriting (for such the poet half confessed it to be) will realize the toughness of the medium in which this patient scholar worked. From the huge, incoherent, and often self-contradictory mass, however, he has planned a double text, which, with the footnotes, gives us an immediate and orderly presentation of the poem, both as it was conceived, and as it was metamorphosed by the poet's timid hand at the dictation of the Time Spirit.

On the left-hand page is the poem as it was written by Wordsworth while still round about the thirties, a maturing genius in the full sap of his growth, strengthened by that stormy passion of his love in France, and dewed by the calmer companionship of Mary Hutchinson and his sister Dorothy. To the establishment of this text Mr. de Selincourt must have brought an infinite amount of labour ; so much tracking down, checking, comparing, and collation has it involved.

On the right-band page is the text approved by the poet when he was eighty years old, sobered and disappointed by success, and somewhat cowed by the disastrous conduct of that Nature in whom at first he had found only a bridal joy.

In additions to the texts, and alternative readings of the footnotes, there are a portrait of the poet at thirty-five, several reproductions of pages of the various manuscripts, and an exhaustive collection of end-notes. To crown-all, we have an introduction which should serve as a model for editors in general. It is a critical history of the growth of the poem. Working on the manuscripts, it interprets them in the light of the knowledge derived from the poet's own letters and life, and from those of the people in his circle. The whole book convinces us that it is one of the most finished pieces of conscientious and loting scholarship that the English genius -has ever produced.

What now of the poem, its nature and its form ? I feel that the greatness of its idea lies in this : that it voices the essential method by which the English religious spirit manifests itself. We cannot say that Shakespeare did precisely that. Engliih as he Wasr-he yet was not enough insulated ; he carried still the stress and agony of the westward-migrating Nordics in his soul. There was the mid-European terror of a vaster Nature—the endless forests, the mercileaS in his relationship to Earth. There Was not the -quietist; half-pagan village-church in his-heart, for he had not settled. That may explain why he is a' national pOet to most of the European countries. Nor did Milton, with 'his Roman grandeur, his political and moral rancour, his wilful perversion of our prosodic technique; achieVe What we find in Wordsworth. Rather Chaucer and Spenser were his spiritual ancestors,

and prepared his 'path.- . • What was that path ? It was to give a body to our native sentiment toward the mystery of life. That sentiment has a special quality. It is not wholly pantheistic, nor is it wholly deist. Again, it has something of a formalist cast, which is manifested in a national habit, by foreign critics mistakenly called sordid and materialist. That facet rationalized itself in Herbert Spencer. Strangely enough, the only philosopher who I think fully represents the whole of this English religious spirit is the Dutch Jew, Spinoza. His methodical system is

too vast and all-embracing to be sectionalized as pantheistic. Again, his formal fitting of the idea of God into Substance

is essentially English in its concrete mysticism. The Prelude brings over to our soil the exalted philosophic genius of Spinoza, and translates it into a poetic and more tangible expression. In doing so it attains an elastic strength and unity that hold the most various and eccentric speculations and experiences together, and give them that single force which makes Wordsworth so unattainable, so elusively superb, even in his most querulously trivial mood.

A comparison of the 1805 and the 1850 texts proves that he never loit that powerful dynamic. Time passed, and enabled him to perfect the technique, that brought our blank verse back to the natural way from which Milton's egotistic genius had diverted it. Mit hii conformity to ecclesiasticism was only the prudent action of his surface consciousness. In both texts we find

- " I was only then

Contented, when with bliss ineffable, I felt the sentiment of Being spread O'er all that moves and all that seemeth still ; O'er all that, lost beyond the reach of thought And human knowledge, to the human eye

' Invisible, yet liveth to the heart." . _ That is the English vision of God, if it be accepted that there is any other than individual illumination. It is the core of Wordsworth's genius, and he never changed. The 1805 text may have been toned down by the ageing man, as approaching-death-dimmed the torrents' roar and the birds' song. For his own comfort, he-had to make that inward voice more independent of the phenomena of nature, the better to

ensure its identity beyond the grave. : • .

I. remember hearing The Faery Queen likened to a cathedral; The Prelude may be called a noble wood, planted by the poet on the slopes of Life ; tended by him through the years of maturity and old age. It stands now with the windS of heaven murmuring amongst its branches. To those who will stay to listen, that sound is the voice of God.

fticuAnn Cninteu. . .