Wordsworth, has been in his grave for some thirty
years, and certainly his lovers and admirers cannot flatter
themselves that this great and steady light of glory as yet
shines over him. He is not fully recognised at home;
he is not recognised at all abroad. Yet I firmly believe
that the poetical performance of Wordsworth is, after
that of Shakspeare and Milton, of which all the world
now recognises the worth, undoubtedly the most consid-
erable in our language from the Elizabethan age to the
present time. Chaucer is anterior ; and on other grounds,
too, he cannot well be brought into the comparison.
But taking the roll of our chief poetical names, besides
Shakspeare and Milton, from the age of Elizabeth down-
wards, and going through it, — Spenser, Dryden, Pope,
Gray, Goldsmith, Cowper, Burns, Coleridge, Scott, Camp-
bell, Moore, Byron, Shelley, Keats (I mention those only
who are dead), — I think it certain that Wordsworth's
name deserves to stand, and will finally stand, above
them all. Several of the poets named have gifts and
excellences which Wordsworth has not. But taking the
performance of each as a whole, I say that Wordsworth
seems to me to have left a body of poetical work superior
in power, in interest, in the qualities which give endur-
ing freshness, to that which any one of the others has
left.
It seems to me that Wordsworth has left be-
hind him a body of poetical work which wears, and
will wear, better on the whole than the performance of
any one of these personages, so far more brilliant and
celebrated, most of them, than the homely poet of
Rydal. Wordsworth's performance in poetry is on the
whole, in power, in interest, in the qualities which give
enduring freshness, superior to theirs.
The Excursion and the Prelude, his poems of greatest
bulk, are by no means Wordsworth's best work. His
best work is in his shorter pieces, and many indeed are
there of these which are of first-rate excellence. But in
his seven volumes the pieces of high merit are mingled
with a mass of pieces very inferior to them; so inferior
to them that it seems wonderful how the same poet
should have produced both. Shakspeare frequently has
lines and passages in a strain quite false, and which are
entirely unworthy of him. But one can imagine his
smiling if one could meet him in the Elysian Fields and
tell him so; smiling and replying that he knew it perfectly
well himself, and what did it matter? But with Words-
worth the case is different. Work altogether inferior,
work quite uninspired, flat and dull, is produced by him
with evident unconsciousness of its defects, and he pre-
sents it to us with the same faith and seriousness as his
best work. Now a drama or an epic fill the mind, and one
does not look beyond them; but in a collection of short
pieces the impression made by one piece requires to be
continued and sustained by the piece following. In
reading Wordsworth the impression made by one of his
fine pieces is too often dulled and spoiled by a very infe-
rior piece coming after it.
Wordsworth composed verses during a space of some
sixty years; and it is no exaggeration to say that within
one single decade of those years, between 1798 and 1808,
almost all his really first-rate work was produced. A
mass of inferior work remains, work done before and
after this golden prime, imbedding the first-rate work
and clogging it, obstructing our approach to it, chilling,
not un frequently, the high-wrought mood with which we
leave it. To be recognised far and wide as a great poet,
to be possible and receivable as a classic, Wordsworth
needs to be relieved of a great deal of the poetical bag-
gage which now encumbers him. To administer this re-
lief is indispensable, unless he is to continue to be a poet
for the few only, a poet valued far below his real worth
by the world.
There is another thing. Wordsworth classified his
poems not according to any commonly received plan of
arrangement, but according to a scheme of mental
physiology. He has poems of the fancy, poems of the
imagination, poems of sentiment and reflexion, and so
on. His categories are ingenious but far-fetched, and
the result of his employment of them is unsatisfactory.
Poems are separated one from another which possess a
kinship of subject or of treatment far more vital and
deep than the supposed unity of mental origin which was
Wordsworth's reason for joining them with others.
Disengaged from the quantity of inferior work which
now obscures them, the best poems of Wordsworth, I
hear many people say, would indeed stand out in great
beauty, but they would prove to be very few in number,
scarcely more than half-a-dozen. I maintain, on the
other hand, that what strikes me with admiration, what
establishes in my opinion Wordsworth's superiority, is
the great and ample body of powerful work which
remains to him, even after all his inferior work has been
cleared away. He gives us so much to rest upon, so
much which communicates his spirit and engages ours!
This is of very great importance. If it were a com-
parison of single pieces, or of three or four pieces, by each
poet, I do not say that Wordsworth would stand deci-
sively above Gray, or Burns, or Coleridge, or Keats, or
Manzoni, or Heine. It is in his ampler body of powerful
work that I find his superiority. His good work itself,
his work which counts, is not all of it, of course, of equal
value. Some kinds of poetry are in themselves lower
kinds than others. The ballad kind is a lower kind; the
didactic kind, still more, is a lower kind. Poetry of this
latter sort, counts, too, sometimes, by its biographical
interest partly, not by its poetical interest pure and sim-
ple ; but then this can only be when the poet producing it
has the power and importance of Wordsworth, a power
and importance which he assuredly did not establish by
such didactic poetry alone. Altogether, it is, I say, by
the great body of powerful and significant work which
remains to him, after every reduction and deduction has
been made, that Wordsworth's superiority is proved.
To exhibit this body of Wordsworth's best work, to
clear away obstructions from around it, and to let it
speak for itself, is what every lover of Wordsworth
should desire. Until this has been done, Wordsworth,
whom we, to whom he is dear, all of us know and feel to be
so great a poet, has not had a fair chance before the
world. When once it has been done, he will make his way
best not by our advocacy of him, but by his own worth
and power. We may safely leave him to make his way
thus, we who believe that a superior worth and power in
poetry finds in mankind a sense responsive to it and
disposed at last to recognise it. Yet at the outset, before
he has been duly known and recognised, we may do
Wordsworth a service, perhaps, by indicating in what his
superior power and worth will be found to consist, and
in what it will not.
Long ago, in speaking of Homer, I said that the noble
and profound application of ideas to life is the most
essential part of poetic greatness." I said that a great
poet receives his distinctive character of superiority from
his application, under the conditions immutably fixed by
the laws of poetic beauty and poetic truth, from his ap-
plication, I say, to his subject, whatever it may be, of
the ideas
" On man, on nature, and on human life,"
which he has acquired for himself. The line quoted is
Wordsworth's own; and his superiority arises from his
powerful use, in his best pieces, his powerful application
to his subject, of ideas "on man, on nature, and on
human life."
Voltaire, with his signal acuteness, most truly re-
marked that "no nation has treated in poetry moral
ideas with more energy and depth than the English
nation." And he adds : "There, it seems to me, is the
great merit of the English poets." Voltaire does not
mean, by "treating in poetry moral ideas," the compos-
ing moral and didactic poems; — that brings us but a very
little way in poetry. He means just the same thing as
was meant when I spoke above "of the noble and pro-
found application of ideas to life"; and he means the
application of these ideas under the conditions fixed for
us by the laws of poetic beauty and poetic truth. If it
is said that to call these ideas moral ideas is to introduce
a strong and injurious limitation, I answer that it is to do
nothing of the kind, because moral ideas are really so
main a part of human life. The question, how to live,
is itself a moral idea; and it is the question which most
interests every man, and with which, in some way or
other, he is perpetually occupied. A large sense is of
course to be given to the term moral. Whatever bears
upon the question, "how to live," comes under it.
" Nor love thy life, nor hate ; but, what thou liv'st.
Live well ; how long or short, permit to heaven."
In those fine lines, Milton utters, as every one at once
perceives, a moral idea. Yes, but so too, when Keats
consoles the forward-bending lover on the Grecian
Urn, the lover arrested and presented in immortal re-
lief by the sculptor's hand before he can kiss, with the
line,
"For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair" —
he utters a moral idea. When Shakspeare says, that
"We are such stuff
As dreams are made of, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep,"
he utters a moral idea.
Voltaire was right in thinking that the energetic and
profound treatment of moral ideas, in this large sense, is
what distinguishes the English poetry. He sincerely
meant praise, not dispraise or hint of limitation; and
they err who suppose that poetic limitation is a necessary
consequence of the fact, the fact being granted as Voltaire
states it. If what distinguishes the greatest poets is their
powerful and profound application of ideas to life, which
surely no good critic will deny, then to prefix to the term
ideas here the term moral makes hardly any difference,
because human life itself is in so preponderating a degree
moral.
It is important, therefore, to hold fast to this: that
poetry is at bottom a criticism of life; that the greatness
of a poet lies in his powerful and beautiful application of
ideas to life, — to the question: How to live. Morals are
often treated in a narrow and false fashion, they are
bound up with systems of thought and belief which
have had their day, they are fallen into the hands of
pedants and professional dealers, they grow tiresome to
some of us. We find attraction, at times, even in a
poetry of revolt against them; in a poetry which might
take for its motto Omar Kheyam's "" words: "Let us
make up in the tavern for the time which we have wasted
in the mosque." Or we find attractions in a poetry
indifferent to them, in a poetry where the contents may
be what they will, but where the form is studied and
exquisite. We delude ourselves in either case; and the
best cure for our delusion is to let our minds rest upon
that great and inexhaustible word life, until we learn to
enter into its meaning. A poetry of revolt against moral
ideas is a poetry of revolt against life; a poetry of in-
difference towards moral ideas is a poetry of indifference
towards life.
Epictetus "had a happy figure for things like the play
of the senses, or literary form and finish, or argumen-
tative ingenuity, in comparison with "the best and
master thing" for us, as he called it, the concern, how to
live. Some people were afraid of them, he said, or they
disliked and undervalued them. Such people were
wrong; they were unthankful or cowardly. But the
things might also be over-prized, and treated as final
when they are not. They bear to life the relation which
inns bear to home. "As if a man, journeying home,
and finding a nice inn on the road, and liking it, were
to stay for ever at the inn! Man, thou hast forgotten
thine object; thy journey was not to this, but through
this.' But this inn is taking." And how many other
inns, too, are taking, and how many fields and meadows!
but as places of passage merely. You have an object,
which is this: to get home, to do your duty to your
family, friends, and fellow-countrymen, to attain inward
freedom, serenity, happiness, contentment. Style takes
your fancy, arguing takes your fancy, and you forget your
home and want to make your abode with them and to
stay with them, on the plea that they are taking. Who
denies that they are taking? but as places of passage, as
inns. And when I say this, you suppose me to be
attacking the care for style, the care for argument. I
am not; I attack the resting in them, the not looking to
the end which is beyond them."
The idea of the high instincts and affec-
tions coming out in childhood, testifying of a divine home
recently left, and fading away as our life proceeds, — this
idea, of undeniable beauty as a play of fancy, has itself
not the character of poetic truth of the best kind; it has
no real solidity. The instinct of delight in Nature and
her beauty had no doubt extraordinary strength in
Wordsworth himself as a child. But to say that uni-
versally this instinct is mighty in childhood, and tends to
die away afterwards, is to say what is extremely doubtful.
In many people, perhaps with the majority of educated
persons, the love of nature is nearly imperceptible at ten
years old, but strong and operative at thirty.
Wordsworth tells of what all seek, and tells of it at its truest and
best source, and yet a source where all may go and draw
for it.
Nevertheless, we are not to suppose that everything is
precious which Wordsworth, standing even at this peren-
nial and beautiful source, may give us. Wordsworthians
are apt to talk as if it must be. They will speak with
the same reverence of The Sailor's Mother for example,
as of Lucy Gray. They do their master harm by such
lack of discrimination. Lucy Gray is a beautiful success;
The Sailor's Mother is a failure. To give aright what he
wishes to give, to interpret and render successfully, is not
always within Wordsworth's own command. It is within
no poet's command; here is the part of the Muse, the
inspiration, the God, the "not ourselves." In Words-
worth's case, the accident, for so it may almost be called,
of inspiration, is of peculiar importance. No poet,
perhaps, is so evidently filled with a new and sacred
energy when the inspiration is upon him; no poet, when
it fails him, is so left "weak as is a breaking wave." I
remember hearing him say that "Goethe's poetry was not
inevitable enough." The remark is striking and true;
no line in Goethe, as Goethe said himself, but its maker
knew well how it came there. Wordsworth is right,
Goethe's poetry is not inevitable; not inevitable enough.
But Wordsworth's poetry, when he is at his best, is
inevitable, as inevitable as Nature herself. It might
seem that Nature not only gave him the matter for his
poem, but wrote his poem for him. He has no style.
He was too conversant with Milton not to catch at times
his master's manner, and he has fine Miltonic lines;
but he has no assured poetic style of his own, like
Milton. When he seeks to have a style he falls into
ponderosity and pomposity.
Wordsworth owed much to Burns, and a style of perfect
plainness, relying for effect solely on the weight and
force of that which with entire fidelity it utters, Burns
could show him.
"The poor inhabitant below
Was quick to learn and wise to know,
And keenly felt the friendly glow
And softer flame ;
But thoughtless follies laid him low
And stain'd his name."
Every one will be conscious of a likeness here to Words-
worth; and if Wordsworth did great things with this
nobly plain manner, we must remember, what indeed he
himself would always have been forward to acknowledge,
that Burns used it before him.
Still Wordsworth's use of it has something unique and
unmatchable. Nature herself seems, I say, to take the
pen out of his hand, and to write for him with her own
bare, sheer, penetrating power. This arises from two
causes: from the profound sincereness with which Words-
worth feels his subject, and also from the profoundly
sincere and natural character of his subject itself. He
can and will treat such a subject with nothing but the
most plain, first-hand, almost austere naturalness. His
expression may often be called bald, as, for instance, in
the poem of Resolution and Independence; but it is bald
as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness which
is full of grandeur.
Wherever we meet with the successful balance, in
Wordsworth, of profound truth of subject with profound
truth of execution, he is unique. His best poems are
those which most perfectly exhibit this balance.
On the whole, then, as I said at the beginning, not
only is Wordsworth eminent by reason of the goodness
of his best work, but he is eminent also by reason of
the great body of good work which he has left to us.
With the ancients I will not compare him. In many
respects the ancients are far above us, and yet there is
something that we demand which they can never give.
Leaving the ancients, let us come to the poets and poetry
of Christendom. Dante, Shakspeare, Moliere, Milton,
Goethe, are altogether larger and more splendid lumi-
naries in the poetical heaven than Wordsworth. But I
know not where else, among the moderns, we are to find
his superiors.
To disengage the poems which show his power, and
to present them to the English-speaking public and to
the world, is the object of this volume. I by no means
say that it contains all which in Wordsworth's poems is
interesting.
I have spoken lightly of Wordsworthians: and if we
are to get Wordsworth recognised by the public and by
the world, we must recommend him not in the spirit of a
clique, but in the spirit of disinterested lovers of poetry.
But I am a Wordsworthian myself....
It is not for nothing that one has been brought
up in the veneration of a man so truly worthy of homage;
that one has seen him and heard him, lived in his neigh-
bourhood and been familiar with his country. No Words-
worthian has a tenderer affection for this pure and sage
master than I, or is less really offended by his defects.
But Wordsworth is something more than the pure and
sage master of a small band of devoted followers, and
we ought not to rest satisfied until he is seen to be what
he is. He is one of the very chief glories of English
Poetry; and by nothing is England so glorious as by her
poetry. Let us lay aside every weight which hinders our
getting him recognised as this, and let our one study be
to bring to pass, as widely as possible and as truly as
possible, his own word concerning his poems : — "They
will co-operate with the benign tendencies in human na-
ture and society, and will, in their degree, be efficacious
in making men wiser, better, and happier."
