Wordsworth and Burns
The Lost Leader. A Study of Wordsworth. By Hugh I'Anson Fausset. (Cape. 12e. 6d.)
THESE two volumes are examples of contrasted methods in biography. Mr. Snyder writes about the external life of his subject, in great detail ; Mr. Fausset devotes himself to the inner self, and makes a little fact go a very long way. Mr. Snyder's book is a full and lengthy biography, packed with references to his authorities ; Mr. Fausset's is, avowedly, a study of but one aspect of the life of Wordsworth, in which the author and his hero have the field to themselves.
To the reviewer, unless he is to deal with the book in scholarly detail, Mr. Snyder's Life of Burns gives an easy task. On its accuracy the experts must decide : but to any careful reader it is clear that here is a book which embodies the latest information on Burns, a book which is fully docu- mented, well illustrated, and written with a balanced judgement and in an inoffensive style ; it is an interesting book, and it should be a valuable work of reference.
The Lost Leader must be judged by different standards. When Mr. Fausset deals with an author, facts (as he showed in the study of John Donne which he published some years ago) are not his main concern ; he is interested in recon- structing a writer's mind and its development by study of his works. For such a study he could hardly have a more fitting subject than Wordsworth. Dorothy Wordsworth's • jburnal, The Prelude in its earlier and later versions, the letters 'that passed between Wordsworth and his friends, together with the recently discovered facts about Wordsworth's relations with Annette Vallon—these give Mr. Fausset just the material that he requires.
Out of these he takes what he needs to support the thesis that Wordsworth through contact with men and cities, through observing the ruin brought on human beings and on whole nations by the free play of natural passion, lost the serene confidence in Nature and in the perfectibility of man by, liberty which illuminated his youth, and instead of adapting himself to the sterner facts of life by a courageous mental discipline, relapsed into an unenlightened rustic philosophy which led him to despise intellectual enlightenment and was inadequate to his own spiritual needs. Wordsworth was thus an apostate, a lost leader,. and his history after 1815 (at which point Mr. Fausset brings his study to an end) is the record of a spoiled life ; we are confronted with a bigoted and hardly articulate conservative, where there had been before an untrammelled mind expressing itself with lyrical spontaneity.
When the poems written by Wordsworth in the period 1797-1815 are examined in the light of the known events of his early life, this view will be found at many points to be confirmed. But it is not necessary in order to reach this conclusion to acquiesce in all the identifications and explana- tions advanced by Mr. Fausset. It is doubtful, for instance, whether Wordsworth was conscious how predominant in his mind was the motif of a girl betrayed and forsaken by her lover, and how far Annette was in his mind when he wrote such poems. Yet their frequency is no doubt some measure of the depth of his own remorse.
Again, though we may agree in the main with Mr. Fausset's account of the development of Wordsworth's personality, we cannot but hesitate to attach to his internal struggles the universal importance that Mr. Fausset sees in them—(" It is for us of the modern world to decide whether we will, in our different but even more challenging circumstances, follow his example " ; " our purpose in this book has simply been to suggest through the life history of a . . . great poet something of what those forces [the ' mysterious forces of life') demand if mankind is to grow beyond its present stage of conflict," and so on).
Enough has perhaps been said to indicate the merits and the defects of the book. It is a sympathetic attempt to trace the course of Wordsworth's development ; nor is it in the main misleading, for the limpidity of the poet's character and the fullness of the personal material in which it is revealed safeguard Mr. Fausset from the vagaries of which he has been guilty in exploring less open and less well-charted territories, But the same reasons which protect him from error in writing this book really obviate the necessity for writing it at all. The substance of it could have been put out in an essay one-tenth its length ; its dimensions are due only to a long- windedness which is the result of loose thinking. Having grasped the essentials of the story, which are plain to every intelligent student of The Prelude and of M. Legouis' discoveries, Mr, Fausset spins to interminable length his moral discourse, repeating the words " life," " reality," " eternity," " soul," " nature," in contexts which show that he uses them more as spells to induce an elevated atmosphere than as terms of thought.
Mr. Fausset subjects to this process everything that he records or quotes : the " simple child " of We Are Seven " " is too instinctively alive for such mental concepts as death and life to have any meaning for her. Or, to put it more succinctly, she is life, and therefore she cannot know death." Again, when Wordsworth writes of moments when .‘ we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul."
Mr. Fausset comments " there are moments . . . when the ordinary faculties are over-ruled. They are caught up and reconciled in a spirit which is eternal ; the bodily faculties of sense-perception and thought no longer exist as such. . . .• The divided self has been made whole in the eternal unity." This is simply a translation of Wordsworth into misty philo- sophical jargon. And the book consists largely of such pas- sages, the writing of which is a process that finds its closest parallel in the making of bread-and-milk. It is to be feared that those who are not interested in Wordsworth will not be interested in Mr. Fausset's book, while those who are will be content with that history of the poet's mind which has been left us by the poet himself and by his friends.
JOHN SPARROW.
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