Part 6 (1/2)

[8] The saerous word 'personality' Our interest in Macbeth may be called interest in a personality; but it is not an interest in some bare foral sense, but in a personality full of matter This matter is not an ethical or universal end, but it must in a sense be universal--human nature in a particular form--or it would not excite the horror, syain, could it excite these feelings if it were not coh value

[9] In relation to _both_ sides in the conflict (though it ent in the catastrophe is emphatically not the finite power of one side It is beyond both, and, at any rate in relation to them, boundless

WORDSWORTH

WORDSWORTH[1]

'Never forget what, I believe, was observed to you by Coleridge, that every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great or original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished; he must teach the art by which he is to be seen My ears are stone-dead to this idle buzz, and s' These sentences, from a letter written by Wordsworth to Lady Beaumont in 1807, may remind us of the common attitude of his reviewers in the dozen years when one by, and there is now no English poet, either of that period or of any other, who has been the subject of criticism more just, more appreciative, we may even say ht have satisfied even that sense of wonder, awe, and solearded the operation of the spirit of poetry within him; and if we desire an interpretation of that spirit, we shall find a really astonishi+ng nue, Hazlitt, Arnold, Swinburne, Brooke, Myers, Pater, Lowell, Legouis,--how easy to add to this list of theh And that the best book on an English poet that has appeared for soht have been expected The whirligig of tie

I have no idea of atte in these two lectures another study, or even an estimate, of Wordsworth My purpose is ood deal of current criticiseneral readers, a disproportionate emphasis is often laid on certain aspects of his s And I should like to offer so as to this tendency, and also some advice as to the spirit in which he should be approached I will begin with the advice, though I am tempted at the last h, who throughout his book has practised what I areater poets than Wordsworth, but none s in a neay Naturally, this would have availed us little if his new things had been private fancies, or if his new perception had been superficial But that was not so If it had been, Wordsworth ht have won acceptancehold on poetic minds As it is, those in whom he creates the taste by which he is relished, those who learn to love hio

Their love for him is of the kind that he hiin,' but 'never ending,' and twined around the roots of their being And the reason is that they find his way of seeing the world, his poetic experience, what Arnolddeep, and therefore so theth, exaltation

It does not thin out or break beneath therow older and wiser; nor does it fail them, much less repel them, in sadness or even in their sorest need And yet--to return to our starting-point--it continues to strike the more It is not like Shakespeare's ood or evil or both, peculiar They can remember, perhaps, the day when first they saw a cloud somewhat as Wordsworth saw it, or first really understood whatand feeling, though now fath, exaltation, but a 'shock ofknown by heart and found full of truth, still remain paradoxes

If this is so, the road into Wordsworth's eness and his paradoxes, and not round them I do not mean that they are everywhere in his poetry Much of it, not to speak of occasional platitudes, is beautiful without being peculiar or difficult; and some of this e But unless we get hold of that, we remain outside Wordsworth's centre; and, if we have not a et hold of that unless we realise its strangeness, and refuse to blunt the sharpness of its edge Consider, for example, two or three of his statements; the statements of a poet, no doubt, and not of a philosopher, but still evidently state, what for him was the most vital truth He said that the hts that often lie too deep for tears He said, in a poem not less sole; and also that she can so influence us that nothing will be able to disturb our faith that all that we behold is full of blessings After aret, he makes hie had once so affected him

That e feel of sorrow and despair Fro shows of Being leave behind, Appeared an idle dream, that could not live Where meditation was

He said that this same Wanderer could read in the silent faces of the clouds unutterable love, and that as for hihty God,'

But thyout a pure intent Is Man arrayed for hter

This last, it will be agreed, is a startling statement; but is it a whit more extraordinary than the others? It is so only if we assuhts that lie too deep for tears, or if we translate 'the soul of all s,' or convert 'all that we behold' into 'a good deal that we behold,' or transfor of the silent faces of the clouds into an argun' But this is the road round Wordsworth's ain, with all Wordsworth's best poems, it is essential not to ood of any true poet, but not in the sa either to feel what is distinctive of the writer, or to appropriate what he says What is characteristic, for example, in Byron's lines, _On this day I complete my thirty-sixth year_, or in Shelley's _Stanzas written in dejection near Naples_, cannot escape discovery, nor is there any difficulty in understanding the mood expressed But with Wordsworth, for ree Take, for instance, one of the most popular of his lyrics, the poem about the daffodils by the lake It is popular partly because it re even to those who convert it into so quite undistinctive of Wordsworth And it is coination a good deal that _is_ distinctive; for instance, the feeling of the sylee, and the Wordsworthian 'emotion recollected in tranquillity' expressed in the lines (written by his wife),

They flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude

But there re still more intimately Wordsworthian:

I wandered lonely as a Cloud That floats on high o'er vales and hills

It is thrust into the reader's face, for these are the opening lines

But with e and outside their own experience And yet it is absolutely essential to the effect of the poehly conventionalised, would re; and it could scarcely excite derision Our point is best illustrated from the pieces by which Wordsworth most earned ridicule, the ballad poems They arose almost always fro character and caet back to this through the poeet back to this and yet consider the poem to be itimate differences of opinion Mr Swinburne sees, no doubt, as clearly as Coleridge did, the intention of _The Idiot Boy_ and _The Thorn_, yet he calls them 'doleful exah he criticised both poems, was very different I believe (if I may venture into the company of such critics) that I see why Wordsworth wrote _Goody Blake and Harry Gill_ and the _Anecdote for Fathers_, and yet I doubt if he has succeeded in either; but a great man, Charles James Fox, selected the former for special praise, and Matthew Arnold included the latter in a selection from which he excluded _The Sailor's Mother_[3] Indeed, of all the poems at first most ridiculed there is probably not one that has not been praised by soed theet inside the out the point by referring more fully to one of them _Alice Fell_ was beloved by the best critic of the nineteenth century, Charles Laeneral distaste for it was such that it was excluded 'in policy' from edition after edition of Wordsworth's Poe to admire in _Alice Fell_; and you may still hear the question asked, What could befor the loss of her cloak? And what, I answer, could behis stick into a pond to find leeches? What sense is there in asking questions about the subject of a poem, if you first deprive this subject of all the individuality it possesses in the poem? Let me illustrate this individualityfor the loss of her cloak is one thing, quite another is a child who has an iination, and who sees the tattered re in the wheel-spokes of a post-chaise fiercely driven by strangers on lonesoht of stor to reach the town she belonged to, she got up behind the chaise, and her cloak was caught in the wheel And she is fatherless and motherless, and her poverty (the poem is called _Alice Fell, or Poverty_) is so extre she does not 'cry'; she weeps loud and bitterly; weeps as if her innocent heart would break; sits by the stranger who has placed her by his side and is trying to console her, insensible to all relief; sends forth sob after sob as if her grief could never, never have an end; checks herself for a moment to answer a question, and then weeps on as if she had lost her only friend, and the thought would choke her very heart It was _this_ poverty and _this_ grief that Wordsworth described with his reiterated ha blows Is it not pathetic? And to Wordsworth it was ony of a soul fro is torn away that wasWhat does it dom, or a tattered cloak? It is the passion that counts Othello onise for a cloak, but 'the little orphan Alice Fell' has nothing else to agonise for Is all this insignificant? And then--for this poeht to the last line--next day the storht, of duffil grey, as warm a cloak as man can sell; and the child is as pleased as Punch[4]

2

I pass on from this subject to another, allied to it, but wider In spite of all the excellent criticisradually been foreneral reader a partial andidea of the poet and his work This partiality is due to several causes: for instance, to the fact that personal recollections of Wordsworth have inevitably been, for the etfulness of his position in the history of literature, and of the restricted purpose of his first important poems; and to the insistence of some of his most influential critics, notably Arnold, on one particular source of his power--an insistence perfectly just, but accompanied now and then by a lack of sympathy with other aspects of his poetry The result is an idea of him which is mainly true and really characteristic, but yet incoht say, somewhat like Millais' first portrait of Gladstone, which renders the inspiration, the beauty, the light, but not the sternness or imperiousness, and not all of the power and fire

Let me try to express this idea, which, it is needless to say, I do not attribute, in the shape here given to it, to anyone in particular

It was not Wordsworth's function to sing, like ic passions, or the actions of supernatural beings His peculiar function was 'to open out the soul of little and fas,' alike in nature and in hureat because of the extraordinary pohich he feels the joy offered to us in nature, the joy offered to us in the simple primary affections and duties' His field was therefore narrow; and, besides, he was deficient in romance, his moral synore the darker aspects of the world But in this very optiulf which for Byron and Shelley yawned between the real and the ideal, had no existence for him For him the ideal was realised, and Utopia a country which he saw every day, and which, he thought, every ht see who did not strive, nor cry, nor rebel, but opened his heart in love and thankfulness to sweet influences as universal and perpetual as the air The spirit of his poetry was also that of his life--a life full of strong but peaceful affections; of a communion with nature in keen but calm and meditative joy; of perfect devotion to the ed; and of a natural piety gradually assuious tone