Reviews of the Week
The Young Wordsworth
LET no one call this book well-timed. That its appearance synchronises with the centenary of Wordsworth's death is accident.
It is much too good a book to `be thought of as serving time or centenaries. Nor, indeed, will Miss Darbishire allow that Words- worth lived until 1850. He died, she thinks, pretty decisively in 1808. The " distinguished but unequal minor poet " to whom we owe The Excursion and the Ecclesiastical Sonnets is a different person. How it happened, who shall say ?—it is " anybody's guess," says Miss Darbishire. Some guesses she does not much like, particularly Mr. Herbert Read's—to whom the two Words- worths are the Man and the Mask, Reality and Myth, the true personality and the assumed. She likes not much better, perhaps, Coleridge's quip about the Janus head, the one side Spinoza, the other side Dr. Watts. Coleridge's " Dr. Watts " is, in any case, odd.
I don't see the University of Oxford giving an honorary degree to Dr. Watts, nor Mr. Keble presenting him for it, nor Mr. Walter Kerr Hamilton entertaining him for the occasion in Merton. These compliments, paid to Wordsworth in 1839, were offered to a High Anglican, to the poet who had called Laud " Saint " and " Patriot." That Wordsworth became a bad poet when he became a good Christian, Miss Darbishire does not persuade herself. Indeed, " at no time of his life," she writes, "except perhaps at the brief period of disillusion after his return from France in 1793, was Wordsworth other than a believing Christian." Yet to Coleridge, in 1796, he was a " semi-atheist " ; and in the summer of the year following the best that Coleridge can find to say of him is that he is " more inclined to Christianity than to Theism, simply considered." In 1798, when he wrote Tintern Abbey, he was a thorough-paced pan- theist—that this poem " might be perverted to serve the purposes of a popular and pantheistic philosophy " was a painful reflection to his biographer, his nephew Christopher Wordsworth, as late as 1851.
How much of his greatest poetry draws its strength from pantheism, Miss Darbishire herself is well aware. Many of the changes which she lists as made in the 1850 Prelude have, as she notices, no other motive than to water down the pantheism of the 1805 text. They give us better Christianity but worse poetry. That from being a great poet Wordsworth became; round and about 1808, a middling one, Miss Darbishire knows—and feels. But it might happen, she says, for all sorts of reasons. She is a little afraid of all of them ; of the religious reason particularly. For her, poetry is too mysterious a_ thing to admit reasons. The spirit bloweth where (and when) it 'listeth. " When it ceases to blow, or blows but feebly and fitfully, what (she asks) is a poet to do ? "
And what is a critic to do with him ? What Miss Darbishire does is to talk about the Wordsworth of 1798-1808, and".let the
" distinguished but unequal minor poet " go hang. That it costs-her something anyone will know who knows how much work, and what good work, she has done recently on The Excursion. But in this"
book The Excursion is nothing, The Prelude everything. If the book- has a fault, it is that its author is too much in a hurry to get on to The Prelude. With the introductory chapter, The Making of the Poet, the only quarrel that can be found is that it is too slight. It concludes with an interesting note upon a lost poein of Wordsworth —The Somersetshire Tragedy; a poem dictated, like Guilt and Sorrow, by Wordsworth's Godwinian interest in penal reform. The manuscript book, which once contained it, is in Dove Cottage: But this poem is wanting. Mr. Gordon Wordsworth, " thinking to guaiii ' his grandfather's reputation," cut it out. Miss Darbishire wishes that " he had not been so scrupulous."
The introductory chapter is followed by a chapter on Lyrical Ballads and the Poems of 1807. There is too much of The Thorn in it, to my mind—" a great and remarkable poem," Miss Darbishire calls it. There is too little, I think, about the poems that have no relation to ballad. About the ballad-pieces, again, are not a good many Wordsworthians a little uneasy—finding in the laboured naturalness of them some ultimate artificiality ? Of this difficulty Miss Darbishire says nothing. This chapter, none the less, contains some of the best Wordsworthian criticism that I know. Nowhere else, perhaps, are the differences which mark off the style.:and temper of the Lyrical Ballads from that of the Poems of l$07 so well put. Nowhere else is the greatness of the great Ode, the
Immortality Ode, better assessed. I must think, evert so, that the Fenwick Note upon the Ode does not help the interpretdtion of it. If I want to know what Wordsworth thought abOut pre-natal existence in 1804, I am not going to be helped by what he thought when he talked about it to Miss Fenwick forty years 4ater—when orthodoxy meant almost more to him than poetry. It is interesting to be reminded, incidentally, that the beginning of the great Ode belongs in time to the same fortnight as Alice Fell.
In her third chapter, the longest and best of her book (I have a feeling that the book was written for the sake of it), Miss 'Darbi- shire comes on to The Prelude. " The most vital work of Wordsworth's genius," she calls it. I can see Matthew Arnold lift his eyebrows. From his essay on Wordsworth—a noble and notable performance—you might suppose that he had never heard of The Prelude; except for a single sentence, where he writes: "The Excursion and The Prelude, his poems of greatest bulk, are by no means Wordsworth's best work." About no other great poem in the language has there been so notable a change of public judgement as about The Prelude. The change of judgement was assisted, no doubt, by De Selincourt's edition of 1926. But the beginnings Of it go back, J think, to 1916. In that year Annette broke on the world'; and the youth of Wordsworth—of which The Ptelude is still the perfect and truthful story—became an absorbing interest with Wordsworthians. That Miss Darbishire's account of the poem owes much to De Selincourt she is only too happy to confess. Half- shyly in these pages she adds to the history of the text new manu- script scraps not known to De Selincourt—I suspect that she has others in her keeping. But everything that she has to say about the poeM is good and worth having. Indeed, if anything so good has been written about it before, I have missed it.
A final - chapter sums Wordsvvorth's " Poetic Achievement." If it is not so exciting as the two immediately preceding chapters, that is not Miss Darbishire's fault. To some extent she is re-saying her good things. When she cothes, to The White Doe,, and The Waggoner, she is necessarily less happy. The Waggoner she calls " a masterpiece in its kind " ' • and she has Lamb with her. For
myself, I confess I find the kind boring. H. W. GARROD.
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