THE REAL WORDS WORTH.
Tens is a striking, not to say startling book, which admirers of Words- worth may regret, but which no student can ignore. That the true Wordsworth was a poet, "realist" rather than "Romantic," not the venerable bard, his white locks wreathed with Rydalian laurels, the friend of Peers and Baronets, eulogized by Keble and acclaimed by the Oxford Doctors, nor again the patriot denouncer of Napoleon, but the red revolutionary in the cap of liberty, the disciple of Rousseau and Godwin, a Wordsworth with a "past," political and personal, not the Wordsworth of 1850 or 1840, of 1830 or 1820 or even 1810, but the Wordsworth of 1790 to 1795—this is indeed a new view. How far is it a true one, or truer than that generally accepted That these volumes are the work of a warm and keen admirer is as it should be. One of the best of Wordsworth's utterances was his remark about the appreciation of a poet :— "You must love him, ore to you He will seem worthy of your love."
It may have been beaten into him by the long neglect and misunder- standing from which he himself suffered. Professor Harper is not by any means blind to Wordsworth's faults. But he takes an exaggerated view, not of his absolute merit, but of his relative greatness. " Words- worth," he says in the opening words of his first page, "is more widely read, and more often quoted, than any other English poet, except Shakespeare and Milton." This may be so in America, but an inquiry among English publishers would, we believe, show the first statement to be, as far as England goes, a mistake. A comparative study of dictionaries of quotation, of the speeches of prominent men, and of the columns of the chief daily papers would show that the second is equally erroneous. Tennyson is certainly far more often quoted, and we believe the publishers would say more bought, and presumably more read, than Wordsworth. The dictionaries, indeed, show both Pope and Byron as very formidable competitors with Wordsworth.
Again, Professor Harper speaks with absurd exaggeration of Words-
worth's skill in art, metre, and style. "In perfection and range of technical skill he is unsurpassed." "He has attempted all things, he has accomplished all things." He never attempted the finest and oldest kind of poem, the epic. He attempted the drama. If " accom- plishc-d " means carried to success, this also is not true, for he so com- pletely failed, both on the stage and with the reader, that only a few students know that he over wrote plays at all. Compared with Words- worth's Borderers, Browning's Strafford achieved success, and Teruryson's Becket overwhelming triumph. As for his skill in motritkation, he is to Tennyson, or Svrinburne, or the present Poet Laureate, as the old- fashioned skater of the days when figure-skating had not been dreamed of to the modern master of the rocker and the bracket. Professor Harper speaks of him as having, "if not exhausted, at least more nearly drained than any other poet the treasury of English rhymes." It is true that "Peter Bell" anticipates some of Browning's boasted audacities, making, for instance, " Ilindoos " rhyme with "windows," and " girl " with "squirrel," and " tethering " with " brethren " ; but as a rule his rhymes, like his rhythms, are ordinary and commonplace, and not seldom loose and careless. It is in his blank verso that he reaches his most consummate and glorious effects. Yet much of his blank verse, it has to be admitted, is merely scanning prose.
Ag,aln, the Professor tells us that his style l "pure English and undefiled," "not encumbered with Latinisms," and that he "does not overload his work with allusions to classical mythology." This also Is partly exaggeration, partly mistake. One of Wordsworth's greatest merits is his magnificent use of Latin words, a merit copied from 31ilton, in which others have followed him. If by "English" is meant words derived from the Saxon sources, Wordsworth, except when pressing his theories, avoids rather than affects them. The staple of Words- worth's ordinary style is what is called Johnsonian. It is the highly Latinized language of the Blue Book. It prefers to call a talc a "narration," a gypsy girl a "female vagrant," outeadt fathers "fugitive progenitors," the spirit of freedom an "indigenous produce," and so on. The very titles of his poems might show this : "The Excursion," "Intimations of Immortality," "An Extempore Effusion," "Resolution
and Independence," "Rural Illusions," "Devotional Incitements." Some are splendid and poetical, others tame and prosy, but they are all Latin. " Vocal," " vernal," "sylvan," are epithets of which he is never tired. And as to classical mythology, the daisy is for him a "little Cyclops," a street fiddler, Orpheus ; while "blithe Flora," "Maternal Flora," "Phoebus," "Sol," and the rest of these gradua figures still haunt his verse despite all his theories. His observation of Nature, again, is admirable, but it is easy to exaggerate its variety. Tennyson did generous justice to it, but Tennyson's own observation was, as Mr. A. Mackie has shown, far more nice and new, and his description far richer, more picturesque, and more exact. As for pure poetry, Keats with his few intense and luscious pieces, Shelley with his soaring spirit, his magic music, and rainbow iridescence, have probably more influence on the poets of to-thy than Wordsworth.
Professor Harper makes yet another claim for him, that he has had an enduring influence on English polities. And here he is somewhat pares doxical, for he rules into the second rank the magnificent patriotic piecet
• William Wordsworth: leis Life, Work, and Influence. By George McLean Barper,Prolcsaor, in Princeton University. 2 vols. London; J. Murray. [24s. net.] of Wordsworth's reaction. These are indeed transcendent. They have been revived, and have recovered, as every one must have noticed, for Wordsworth the popularity which he had been losing since the dis- appearance of the last generation. These poems, the glorious sonnets, the noble lines on "The Happy Warrior," have had, and will ever have, a high value for Englishmen, and a potent effect in refreshing and main. taining national ideals. Wordsworth is in the highest sense a great and noble English poet. While his faults are many, and while few have surpassed him in the art of "sinking in poetry," yet in the mountain range of the poets, to use Goethe's fine metaphor, he lifts his austere peak high among all but the very highest.
It was time that a new portrait of the poet should be presented, and
Professor Harper's love and labour have done a real servioe. Large gratitude, in particular, Is owing to him for his honesty. He will not persuade us, as he endeavours to do, that Wordsworth is even greater than we have known, because we have been all wrong about hint, because the real and natural Wordsworth was not the patriot and the Laureate, the Churchman and the Constitutionalist, but was a Vol- tairien mangui more akin to Byron and Shelley than to Cowper and Herbert. But he has given us new facts, and put the old facts in new light and proportion. He says truly that Bishop Wordsworth's "family portrait" of his uncle is flattering, that he devotes two-thirds of his pages to the poet's old age of prosperous propriety, and only one-third to his formative years of rebellion and struggle, and that Professor Knight has not sufficiently redressed the balance. It has long been known that Wordsworth, like many another, underwent much change in passing from youth and poverty to age and affluence, from ardour to achievement, from battle to calm ease and retrospect, from doubt or indifference to faith. He has been twitted before now by poets who were themselves to follow—such is the irony of destinies—the same curve of life as the "Lost Leader," but we have not known how much the party of revolt had lost, how much ho had been one with them. We all knew that in his youth he had visited France in the red morning of the Revolution, that ho had sympathized with and shared its enthu- siasms, and condoned much of its excesses. In so doing he did not go further than many Englishmen of his time, rich and poor, high and low, political and private. Of that he made no secret himself, even in his later years, when he printed :—
"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven I"
Wordsworth, however, had always seemed a little intoxicated by the spirit of that hour. It appears now that there was an element of personal as well as public passion in the brimming cup of liberty of which he drank. He was in love. He had formed a liaison with a French girl, Annette Yellen, and in course of time became the father of a child who was named Caroline. Professor Harper touches on this sad and startling episode with delicacy but with frankness, as apparently Wordsworth himself did. He visited mother and child from time to time. Caroline was, it seems, the "dear child," the "dear girl," who walked with the poet on Calais beach in 1802, and who is described in the well-known sonnet as "lying in Abraham's bosom all the year." She married in 1816, and the Wordsworths saw her mother and herself in Paris in 1820. All this is somewhat of a revelation; but what Professor Harper emphasizes still more is the discovery that Wordsworth in his youth had his intellectual liaisons and sowed his philosophic wild oats also, and was for a time a follower of William Godwin and a member of his well-known "Circle." What that circle in its more squalid aspects was like we may judge from the picture drawn by Matthew Arnold in his essay on Shelley. Yet at the time Wordsworth preferred his teaching not only to theology but to science. "Throw aside your books of chemistry," he cried, "and read Godwin on Necessity." Professor Harper suggests, what is very interesting, that it was there that he heard of Pantisocracy and of Southey and Coleridge, and so made the friendship which altered the course of his whole life and that of English poesy. If Godwin indirectly introduced him to Coleridge, he provided the antidote to his own dangerous toxins. Coleridge made Wordsworth a philosopher. But it was, as the poet himself allowed, his sister Dorothy who really made him a poet. Every new discovery only helps to demonstrate the magnitude of his debt to this "most sisterly of souls." It was when he set up house with her that his distinctive poetic life began. And much as Professor Harper may affect to deplore the falling away from the true lights of rationalism which she brought about, it must be admitted that he has described nothing more beauti- fully and fairly than Dorothy's influence on her brother and their common and uncommon friend Coleridge. The sojourn in Somersetshire was a veritable idyll in all their lives. "Wordsworth's exquisite sister" it was who inspired alike the "Lyrical Ballads" and "The Ancient Mariner" and " CaristabeL" Rightly does Professor Harper rise into a strain of ecstasy about her. "Poetry," he says, "owes more to her than to any other person who was not actually a great poet."
Wordsworth returned to his native Westmorland, and became for the remainder of his days and for all days a Lake Poet. About the rest of his life no mystery hangs. Professor Harper tells it very well, tracing its long, slow evolution with tender sympathy and affectionate diligence. It is impossible to do justice either to his method or his results in a single review. Such a careful analysis and documentation of a poet and his works has seldom been attempted. It is typical, and in many ways finely typical, of the new American school of literary research. It will not, however, please the Wordsworthians, the old Wordsworthians at any rate, and it may be doubted whether it is really, in the large, more faithful than the happier while simpler appreciations of Matthew Arnold and F. W. H. Myers. Wordsworth's early "elective affini- ties," philosophic, political, and personal, must doubtless be reckoned with. Professor Harper seems to hold that had he been truer to his first loves he might have benefited the world still more. But he would not have been Wordsworth. He followed, if ever man did, his own inward bent with unflinching, self-confident, even tiresome stubbornness. In what does his real greatness consist ? It consists in the penetration and sincerity of his observation, alike of Nature and human nature, and In his lofty ideals. His finest utterances have that quality which Newman so eloquently attributes to the ancient classics, of "sad earnestness and vivid exactness." His reflections are often those of a hard, shrewd, logical mind. He is didactic and dictatorial, but he has vision. Above all, he has inspiration—the gift of Heaven. Finally, he had had experience, wider than is sometimes realized. To know what his experience had been in its entirety helps our understanding of him, and the endeavour to "paint him with his warts" has its uses, even If the result is not always agreeable or quite just. Yet when all is said, he remains an idealist, and it is by the idealists, not by the realists, that he will be loved and kept alive.
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