Wordsworth as a Political Force
PROFESSOR HERFORD has added something worth while to the huge literature on Wordsworth. In a hasty reading of his book I find two principal preoccupations which show at once that the author dissociates himself from the army of apologists who feel that it is necessary to explain to the world that Wordsworth was not a mumbling sentimentalist weaving daisy. chains of pantheism. The poet emerges from this inquiry much more truly portrayed, a firmly argued individualist sub- sisting under a presiding genius of the universe as a direct microcosm thereof, putting into his thought and actions that simple principle, and building on it his theory and conduct of art, philosophy, religion and polities.
It is Wordsworth's exploitation of his own character in relation to the evolution of his contemporary political thought that occupies so important a place in Professor Herford's study. There is good reason for this emphasis. We arc not to-day particularly concerned with Wordsworth's aesthetics. It is true that they were founded in the same singular character, and therefore might profitably he examined to throw more light upon the origins of the poet's austere personality. But his theories of art have served their turn. Their effect on English poetry is something that is enormous but possibly completed, and one feels that the explorations of Myers, Masson, and others in this field leave little to be 'said. I exclude, of course, the practice of his art. That is a story that will not so easily be concluded, since his poetry sprang out of a deeper part of that personality, one which the poet could never articulate into the corpus of his theory. But the intru-, don of theories of individualism into the dogmas of art always' has something of the effect of carrying coals to Newcastle. It has done so, at least, since the Renaissance destroyed all idea of anonymous or corporate art and made the idea of " art " coincide with that of self-exploitation of the individual. Wordsworth brought no exception to this belief, and that is perhaps why as an aesthetician he has no influence to-day. We are, I sincerely believe, • moving tOwitrds—or back to— corporate art ; the ballet, the skyscraper, the talkie ffim which may become the only outlet for the poet. For a time the solitary self-communer may be treated as a social and artistic invalid, to be ostracised at the dictates of psycho-therapy. However this may be, Wordsworth as a political thinker interests us because already the submergence of the individual in the political body has begun to be suspect. Dreadful factors like unemployment and large-scale State-rescue have begun to oppress the people, and to make them feel that mass-production and mass-control are not the final word in political economy. Teachers such as Ruskin and William Morris are again likely to he examined in respect of their doctrines of economic pro- duction by dispersed forces, while Wordsworth will be looked to for his firmly held and often-stated views on Nationalism and its shaping in accordance with local and individual auto.. nomy. The rugged, granite, moss-ridged old Helvellyn of a poet has been attacked for his apostasy as a matter of course by all newcomers to the arena. "Just for a handful of silver he left us, Just for a riband to stick in his coat" said Browning of him. But it was a lie, and only proves how flushed with after-dinner enthusiasm Browning could become. Wordsworth as a Republican in the days of his great love-affair, and Wordsworth seventeen years later writing the "Tract on the Convention of Cintm " as a protest against our cessation of hostilities towards the French in the Peninsula, was not a turn- coat. In both phases he was manifesting the one simple, obstinate quality of his character ; and that quality was his mystical belief in the "sacred egoism" by which a human being should ultimately be guided, and over which the forces of culture and social and political necessity should never be allowed to tyrannize. He was always, and most consistently, a provincial, a rustic, putting his faith in a deity shaped in the form of personal lares and local nature. If he saw the world ever as others saw it, that is, as a cosmopolitan, such self- forgetful wonder was, as Professor Herford says, "subject to intrusions of an imperious intuition of himself, which trans- formed his (social) sensations, denied their independent existence, or even blotted them out. At these timer he felt that 'the mind Is lord and master, and the outward sense Is but the obedient servant of his will.'
To these moments= shots of time' in his vivid phrase—ire, in the Prelude, ascribed the chief efficacious influence,' and his life, as far back as memory could reach, seemed full of them. Such experiences were natural moods in the boy whose sense of the indomitableness of the Spirit within I was so vivid that, as he told in his old age, he would broo:l over the stories of Enoch and Elijah,' half persuaded that, whatever might happen to others, he would similarly escape death ; the boy who, on his way to school,' would grasp a wall or a tree to save himself from the abyss of idealism.' One of these 'spots of time' belongs to the early days before the break-up of the home. It is too significant to be passed by, even in a brief biography."
It is indeed too significant, since it is the means by which the integrity of Wordsworth's genius in its manifestation upon his long life is to be explained or, if need be, vindicated. Such vindication, as I have suggested above, is the main thesis of Professor Herford's excellent study. ' His other explorations—to me much more interesting as they deal with the magical beauty of the work of this poets' poet, this Elijah of the divine art—I have no space to discuss. It is more important, considering our present-day political and social bewilderments, to emphasize as I have done the one aspect of- Wordsworth the Nationalist, and to introduce Professor Herford's excursion on this subject. Iticunan CHURCH.
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