Part 7 (1/2)

--that song which was never completed--yet, some ten years later, he still hoped, when it should be finished, to write an epic Whether at any time he was fitted for the task or no, he wished to undertake it; and his addiction, by no means entire even in his earlier days, to little and fas was due, not at all to an opinion that they are the only right subjects or the best, nor merely to a natural predilection for them, but to the belief that a particular kind of poetry anted at that tiht, a 'degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation' The violent excite accumulation of men in cities, where the unifor for extraordinary incident, which the rapid coratifies,' had induced a torpor of ross and sensational effects--such effects as were produced by 'frantic novels,' of the Radcliffe or Monk Lewis type, full ofspectres He wanted to oppose to this tendency one as far removed from it as possible; to write a poetry even _edies or Spenser's stories of knights and dragons; to show men that wonder and beauty can be felt, and the heart be moved, even when the rate of the pulse is perfectly nor to interest himself in the Somersetshi+re fairies, and declared that he desired for his scene no planet but the earth, and no region of the earth stranger than England and the lowliest ways in England And, being by no hter as easily provoked and could swing his crook with uncommon force, he asserted his convictions defiantly and carried them out to extremes And so in later days, after he had somewhat narrohen in the Seventh Book of the _Excursion_ he made the Pastor protest that poetry was not wanted to ate the pangs and turbulence of passionate love, he did this perhaps because the world which would not listen to him[6] was enraptured by _Marreat Wordsworth's success ht have been in fields which he deliberately avoided, it is perhaps idle to conjecture I do not suppose it would have been very great, but I see no reason to believe that he would have failed With regard, for instance, to love, one cannot read without a smile his reported statement that, had he been a writer of love-poetry, it would have been natural to hiree of warmth which could hardly have been approved by his principles, and which ht have been undesirable for the reader But onehis statement And, in fact, Wordsworth neither wholly avoided the subject nor failed when he touched it The poems about Lucy are not poems of passion, in the usual sense, but they surely are love-poems The verses _'Tis said that some have died for love_, excluded froh And the following lines from _Vaudracour and Julia_ make one wonder how this could be to Arnold the only poem of Wordsworth's that he could not read with pleasure:

Arabian fiction never filled the world With half the wonders that rought for hi; Life turned the meanest of her iold; The house she dwelt in was a sainted shrine; Her chalory The portals of the dawn; all paradise Could, by the si of a door, Let itself in upon him:--pathways, walks, Swared, within him, overblest to move Beneath a sun that wakes a weary world To its dull round of ordinary cares; A man too happy for mortality!

As a whole, _Vaudracour and Julia_ is a failure, but these lines haunt my memory, and I cannot think them a poor description of that which they profess to describe This is not precisely 'passion,' and, I admit, they do not prove Wordsworth's capacity to deal with passion Thewhether, if he had hest level, is that, so far as we can see, he did not strongly feel--perhaps hardly felt at all--that the _passion_ of love is a way into the Infinite; and a thing must be no less than this to Wordsworth if it is to rouse all his power Byron, it seemed to him, had

dared to take Life's rule from passion craved for passion's sake;[7]

and he utterly repudiated that 'The immortal mind craves objects that endure'

Then there is that 'ro the word I a the familiar distinction between two tendencies of the Romantic Revival, one called naturalistic and one called, in aother ways, by a love of the marvellous, the supernatural, the exotic, the worlds of y

It is a just and necessary distinction: the _Ancient Mariner_ and _Michael_ are very dissimilar But, likewhen it is roughly handled or pushed into an antithesis; and it would be easy to show that these two tendencies exclude one another only in their inferior examples, and that the better the example of either, the more it shows its coreat deal of truth to nature in _Lalla Rookh_, but there is plenty in the _Ancient Mariner_: in certain poems of Crabbe there is little romance, but there is no want of it in _Sir Eustace Grey_ or in _Peter Gri the distinction, however, as we find it, and assu, as I do, that it lay beyond Wordsworth's power to write an _Ancient Mariner_, or to tell us of

on the foam Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn,

we are not therefore to conclude that he was by nature deficient in ro hat he refused to write The indications are quite contrary Not to speak here of his own peculiar dealings with the supernatural, his vehement defence (in the _Prelude_) of fairy-tales as food for the young is only one of es which show that in his youth he lived in a world not haunted only by the supernatural powers of nature He delighted in 'Arabian fiction' The 'Arabian sands' (_Solitary Reaper_) had the salamour for him as for others His dream of the Arab and the two books (_Prelude_, v) has a very curious roh it is not romance _in excelsis_, like _Kubla Khan_ His love of Spenser; his very description of hih his clouded heaven With the moon's beauty and the moon's soft pace;

the very lines, so characteristic of his habitual attitude, in which he praises the Osmunda fern as

lovelier, in its own retired abode On Grasmere's beach, than Naiad by the side Of Grecian brook, or Lady of the Mere Sole-sitting by the shores of old roes, all point the same way He would not carry his readers to the East, like Southey and Moore and Byron, nor, like Coleridge, towards the South Pole; but when it suited his purpose, as in _Ruth_, he could write well enough of un-English scenery:

He told of the h overhead, The cypress and her spire; Of flowers that with one scarlet gleaues, and seem To set the hills on fire

He would not choose Endymion or Hyperion for a subject, for he was deterlishion in the _Excursion_ is full of iht inspiration to Keats, and thefor the perished glory of Greek myth which appears in much Romantic poetry came froan suckled in a creed outworn; So liht of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn

As for war, Wordsworth neither strongly felt, nor at all approved, that eleether with reat poetry And assuredly he could not, even if he would, have rivalled the last canto of _Mare of Corinth_ But he is not to be judged by his intentional failures The martial parts of the _White Doe of Rylstone_ are, with few exceptions, uninteresting, if not painfully tame The former at least they were ue The modest poet was as stiff-necked a person as ever walked the earth; and he was determined that no reader of his poem whoelse

Probably he overshot his mark For readers who could understand him the effect he aimed at would not have been weakened by contrast with an outward action narrated with more spirit and sympathy But, however thatat the Feast of Brougha was not written for its own sake It was designed with a view to the transition to the longer ht of peace in communion with nature, and the wonderful stanza 'Love had he found in huts where poor men lie' But, for the effect of this transition, it was necessary for Wordsworth to put his heart into the ; and surely it has plenty of anilory Its author need not have shrunk from the subject of war if he had wished to handle it _con aht have been the author of the _White Doe_, and perhaps of _Brougham Castle_, and possibly of the _Happy Warrior_ He could no more have composed the _Poems dedicated to National Independence and Liberty_ than the political sonnets of Milton And yet Wordsworth wrote nothingto praise, since Mr Swinburne's praise of them is, to my mind, not less just than eloquent They are characteristic in many ways The later are, on the whole, decidedly inferior to the earlier Even in this little series, which occupies the first fifteen years of the century, the decline of Wordsworth's poetic power and the increasing use of theological ideas are clearly visible

The Odes, again, are much inferior to the majority of the Sonnets And this too is characteristic The entire success of the _Ode to Duty_ is exceptional, and it is connected with the fact that the poeular stanzas of a siular Odes are never thus successful Wordsworth could not command the tone of sustained rapture, and where his ular his ear is uncertain The Ireatest product, but not his best piece of work The Odes a are declamatory, even violent, and yet they stir co The sense ofthe utterance it permits itself, is that which most moves us in his political verse And the Sonnet suited this

The patriotism of these _Poems_ is equally characteristic It illustrates Wordsworth's total rejection of the Godwinian ideas in which he had once in vain sought refuge, and his belief in the necessity and sanctity of for from natural kinshi+p It is composed, we may say, of two eleh pitch, the love of 'a lover or a child'; the love that makes it for son land, and that makes them feel their country's virtues and faults, and joys and sorrows, like those of the persons dearest to them

We talk as if this love were common It is very far from common; but Wordsworth felt it[9] The other element in his patriotism I must call by the dreaded name of 'moral,' a name which Wordsworth did not dread, because itstereotyped or narrow His country is to him the representative of freedoht Of Liberty that yet remains on earth

This Liberty is, first, national independence; and that requires military power, the maintenance of which is a primary moral duty[10]

But neither military power nor even national independence is of value in itself; and neither could be long ives value to both This is the freedo, indifference to the externals of mere rank or wealth or power, domestic affections not crippled (as they may be) by poverty Wordsworth fears for his country only when he doubts whether this inward freedoland, in the war against Napoleon, is to hi Parliament and the Coent of God's purpose on the earth His ideal of life, unlike Milton's in the stress he lays on the domestic affections and the influence of nature, is otherwise of the same Stoical cast His country is to hihty nation, proud in arms[12]

And his own pride in it is, like Milton's, in the highest degree haughty It would be caluiven by the Irishman Goldsmith,

Pride in their port, defiance in their eye, I see the lords of human kind pass by;