BOOKS.
PROFESSOR KNIGHT'S LIFE OF WORDSWORTH.* THE author of these portly and finely printed volumes writes as if brevity were a fault which biographers should avoid. But, as a rule, brevity is not more the soul of wit than it is of biography, and although Professor Knight errs in company with a numerous host of writers, his error in its results is deplorable. We shall, however, leave the infinite deal of nothing which he records uncriticised, and accepting his statement that his " store-house of facts may be called a quarry rather than a building," we shall work for a short time in that quarry, with a view to indicate the veins of ore which glitter in its depths. " It can be of little consequence," he says, " to any who read these volumes to know what the writer thinks of Wordsworth, of his place as a poet in the great hierarchy of genius, and of his function as a teacher of mankind ; but it matters a good deal that they should have authentic information as to what manner of man Wordsworth was, as to what he thought and said and did, and that they should know the relations he sus- tained towards the more distinguished of his contempora s."
We assume that the last phrase means in effect, t he thought of his contemporaries and what they thou t of him.
Well, here is Southey's opinion, from a letter • erto unpub- lished :—" William Wordsworth is a most extraordinary man; one whose powers as a poet it is not possible to overrate, and who will stand in the front rank of poets. It is the vice of his intellect to be always on the stretch and strain; to look at • The Life of William Wordsworth. By William Knight, LL.D., Professor of Moral Philosophy, St. Andrews. 3 vols. Edinburgh : W. Paterson. 1589. pileworts and daffy-down-dillies through the same telescope which he applies to the moon and stars, and to find subject for philosophising and fine feeling, just as Don Quixote did for chivalry, in every peasant and vagabond whom he meets." Wordsworth judged Southey quite as fairly. He told Crabb Robinson that Southey was one of the cleverest men now living, and justly, says Robinson, denied ideality to Southey's works. " He never inquires," says Wordsworth, " on what idea his poem is to be wrought ; what feeling or passion is to be excited; but he determines on a subject, and then reads a great deal, and combines and corrects industriously ; but he does not give anything which impresses the mind strongly, and is recollected in solitude." These criticisms are both of them somewhat severe, and unjust in effect, though not in intention ; but, we are grateful to Mr. Knight for recording them. We are also grateful to him for quoting from the late Bishop of Lincoln, Wordsworth's admission that " Shelley is one of the best artists of us all ; I mean in workmanship of style." But we are not so grateful to him for marking a hiatus after this sentence, and continuing his quotation thus :— " S—, in the work you mentioned to me, confounds imagery and imagination." This will be darkness visible to any reader; and it is by a mere chance that we discovered from the index that Wordsworth is here speaking of Shelley's " Peter Bell the Third." Now, some of the stanzas in that poem are splendid specimens of literary criticism. But in others, Shelley, like Aristophanes, overshoots the mark. He does so,. of course, when he says that Wordsworth had "no more imagination than a pint-pot." The serious and good-tempered way in which Wordsworth meets this strong but meaningless charge is pleasant to read. And Shelley himself, we are sure, would have laughingly admitted that the famous stanza about "a party in a parlour," in the original text of "Peter Bell" gave the lie to his charge. He would also, we are equally sure, have assented cordially to Professor Knight's view, that the poet was mistaken in withdrawing that extraordinary stanza. We wish, also, that the splendid tribute which Shelley paid to Wordsworth's poetry, in The Witch of Atlas, had been quoted. There was a fine opportunity of doing so, when Wordsworth's somewhat regretful confession that he had never seen that poem is mentioned.' And although there are, roughly speaking, more than a thousand passages which might have been extracted without loss from these volumes to make room for that quota- tion, we shall quote one as a sample. It marks, indeed, the "relations" which Wordsworth "sustained toward" the greatest of his poetical contemporaries ; but the Professor might have better suppressed than revealed the fact that Wordsworth, like every one else, whether wise or simple, could talk nonsense, when he spoke in crass ignorance of what he was talking about. He knew a great deal more about Goethe than Landor or Byron knew. But we can only infer Landor's ignorance from his silence, and Byron was wise enough to praise the poet, whose merits he was compelled to take on trust. Wordsworth was altogether too honest to do likewise, and although he confessed that he could never read Goethe, he still ventured to take up his ground " on the first canto (!) of Wilhelm Meister," and say— but on consideration, we will not quote from the Professor what he ought himself to have left unquoted. We can find a prettier sample of Wordsworth's unblushing ignorance, and of his biographer's also; and although the ignorance in each case might be more fairly described as carelessness, it is hardly necessary to be nice in distinguishing here between cause and consequence. A good translator, like a good poet, " is made as well as born." Coleridge and Shelley were born translators ; Byron was not, though he might, perhaps, have made himself one. Wordsworth was neither born nor made a good translator, though his genius 'was akin to Milton's ; and Milton as a translator is as bad as Wordsworth was.
e have only room, here and now, to quote the latter at his %Tont, without much comment. "At the close of the first laCiak of the dEneicl," he writes to Lord Lonsdale, " Dido is described 'i.g,Asking several questions of Venus,— . Nune q les Diomedis equi, nano quantus Achilles,'
which Dryden trap tee very nearly, I think, thus :—
The steeds of ' ,inede varied the discourse,' &c.
My own translation is probably as faulty upon another principle
Of Hector asked if Priam o'er and o'er What arms the son of bright Aurora wore, What horses then of Diomede, had great
Achilles—but, 0 Queen, the whole relate:" We have italicised the misprints and blunders in this astonishing passage, and it is Greek to us how a pains- taking translator could, at the end of the first book of the Jneid, confound the hero with his mother, and how a hypo- thetically accurate editor could by letting "if " stand for " of," and " had " for " how," make nonsense more nonsensical'. There are some interesting passages that might be quoted as samples of the ore to be found in Professor Knight's "quarry but, on the whole, it seems to ui that it would be not quite fair to do so. The value of Professor Knight's jewels is so enor- mously increased by their rarity, that if we set any of them before the reader, we should inevitably be led into criticism of a kind which we are anxious to eschew.
We shall notice one or two side-lights that are thrown on. Wordsworth's character in these volumes,. and dismiss them• then with a hope that they will find more appreciative readers. in other men than they have in the present writer. The poet was a man of great piety, and it behoved him to be so, as he regarded the duty of a poet to be essentially that of a teacher.. It is affecting, therefore, to find that he was so moved by the drowning of his brother John at sea, as to arraign the dealings. of " the supreme Governor" with mankind in language that Louis XIV. could hardly have surpassed. He was a devoted' adherent of the Church of England, and said on one occasion with great emphasis that he would die for her ; but as he rather avoided going to church, his zeal rather recalls the zeal of the Polish nobleman who declared that he would die for his country, and do anything for it gladly, except live in it. His sensibility was highly wrought, and " the thoughts too deep for tears " which he found in humble flowers are a little too high and good; perhaps, " for human nature's daily food." But these thoughts, and their companions lie at the core of some of Wordsworth's best poetry. It is to them, and to the fact that he very often wrote in a style very unlike that of a great artist in words, that Wordsworth's popularity was a plant of such slow growth. It has proved, however, to be a hardy perennial; and without venturing upon any foolish prediction or any odious comparison, it may be laid down as a rale that the more a student learns to like in this great poet, the better he is qualifying himself to judge and enjoy "high thinking." Wordsworth's sympathies were broader and stronger than might have been expected in a man. of his ascetic habits. Enough, and more than enough, has been written about his dealings with his personal friends. But we are pleased to be reminded that he " dearly loved. Horace," and to infer with confidence that he dearly loved. Burns. For a lady without an ounce of Mrs. Grandy in her composition, having heard a panegyric on Burns passed by Wordsworth which much surprised her, questioned the great poet-teacher on his sentiments. He replied with such pathos, force, and dignity, that she was quite vanquished. But Horace and Burns very clearly had faults with which Wordsworth, could not possibly sympathise. The man, therefore, who has been stigmatised by those who never read him as a solemn and self-contained prig, must have been a warm-hearted man of high imagination. And this, no doubt, is one of the reasons why Wordsworth, with a far from handsome presence, and with a far from seductive address, made so powerful and favourable an impression upon the elite of his contemporaries when they Met him. Proofs that he did so will be found in Professor- Knight's volumes, and these.proofs are very pleasant reading. There is also, we find, on looking down the list of things which we had marked for notice, so much which should also be pro- fitable reading, that we begin to fear that we have spoken too. harshly of this work. On the whole, however, we cannot possibly underrate the amount of the pains taken to condense what needed condensation. Experienced men with a vast capacity for skipping may be left to glance through it, without a word of advice from us. But we can and do recommend it most emphatically as an encyclopmdic book of reference fon all whom such a book of reference concerns.
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