ENGLAND'S DEBT TO WORDSWORTH.
AREMARKABLY brilliant summer is in its full efful• gence, and crowds of jaded city folk are renewing their youth on mountain-top, on moorland heather, or by the sea. Year by year the exodus is greater, and the range of summer travel wider. Whole classes of society, that only a few years ago never thought of anything more than an occasional day in the country, and a visit be the old family home, now scour vast areas—Wales, Scotland, Switzerland, the Rhine—in search of the glories of Nature. We are so familiar with the crowded train and steamer, with the cosmopolitan table d'hote, that we scarcely realise how very new all this is in English life. The actual physical cause of the universal modern holi- day is of course the large modern city, which uses us up so fast that if we could not, Anta3us•like, renew at times our intimate acquaintance with mother earth we should be in danger of extinction through physical and moral anxmia. But the reason why many of us derive such deeper benefits from our annual contact with Nature,—how did we secure that gift of the gods ? Had we lived in the middle of the last century our feelings towards Nature in her wilder aspects would have been quite different. The poet Cowper, who was a genuine lover of natural scenery, yet found the downs of Sussex "frightful." What he would have thought of the Bernese Oberland it is impossible to guess; but we know from history that his attitude towards the sterner and grander scenery was shared by the majority of civilised man- kind until Cowper's own time. Then came a blessed change.
In England the change has been mainly due to the poetry of one man of genius. Doubtless the movement towards intimate association with Nature was, as we say, "in the air." Rousseau had been its European prophet, Chateanbriand confirmed the impression Rousseau had made, but the man who impressed for all future time the idea of the sublimity of Nature, the idea of her interaction with the mind of man, of her healing power, of her revelation of the divine, was William Wordsworth. The poet tells us in " l'he Prelude"" that to him came early the irresistible conviction that he was a "dedicated spirit," and surely no more hallowed mission was ever entrusted to human genius than that which was laid upon Wordsworth. To interpret Nature to those who had been sitting in darkness and in the shadow of death, to reveal a relation between Nature and man that had not been suspected, to steep the mind of a whole people. not for a moment, as some mere wunderkind might do, but for future ages, in what Carlyle called "natural - supernaturalism," so that the commonest objects by the roadside irradiate a new glory for those who have caught Wordsworth's spirit,— what Hebrew prophet ever had a more sacred task ccannitted to him P Whatever mere carping criticism may say, whatever just and sane criticism from the pen of Arnold, Lowell, or Soberer may rightly and profitably suggest, the fact rem a;ns that England could have afforded to lose any single one of her poets sooner than Wordsworth, because he has provided her with that sublime idealism which a strong, naturally materialistic race most needed. We will risk being misinterpreted when we say that not even to Shakespeare do we owe such a debt as to Wordsworth.
The poet wrote, as he himself phrased it, "on man, on Nature, and on human life," these varied elements—the nature and destiny of the race, the forms of the external world, and the daily cares and deeds of individuals—being first blended, in the course of English poetry, into a noble unity. We get no such impression in the joyous verse of Chaucer, in the profound meditation of Shakespeare, in the grand strains of Milton. Whatever they knew or thought of Nature, they had not related it to man ; that glorious bridal ceremony, to use his own imagery, was effected by Words- worth. It was he who divined the one spirit whose `-` dwelling is the light of setting suns, and the round ocean, and the living air, and in the mind of man,"—though we must not in justice forget Pope's more prosaic approxi- mation to this great conception of a world pene- trated all through with living divine power. How childish and jejune seem the Nature-poems of the years immediately preceding Wordsworth, the pretty platitudes of Gray and Goldsmith, even the larger and more living treat- ment of Cowper, beside passages from the " Excursion," "There was a boy, ye cliffs and islands of Winander,' " Tin. tern Abbey," " Michael," " The Solitary Reaper," " The Yew Trees of Lorton Vale," " Daffodils," and many another poem ! We read these, and dim traditions of our race gradually take shape in the mind and become living forges, resetting our whole scheme of things, and yielding us a joy and consols. tion which may be truly and reverently said to pass all under. standing. Yes, for the understanding works by its own rules of analysis governed by curiosity, and often, as Wordsworth says, it "murders to dissect." But in these blessed poems the sundered world is recreated, the sick mind is healed, the living unity is revealed, we are made one with Nature, but with a Nature which is, as "Faust" has it, no dead fact, but the living garment of Deity. If Wordsworth has done this for us, are we not justified in claiming for him the unique position he holds in the literature of England P
Wordsworth, who disliked analysis and dissection, never. theirs& believed firmly that science must come round to his view. It is certainly remarkable that the main ideas of Wordsworth are becoming slowly but surely the watchwords of science, thus showing that the poetical mind does not give forth as its products mere beautiful fancies, but that it really creates, that its function is, as Shelley said in his magnificent " Defence of Poesy," to anticipate the conclusions of analytic reason. The poet early sees what others pain- fully discover. Wordsworth saw the unity of the world, the oneness of man with Nature, now the corner-stone of science. He saw that this unity was not to be inter- preted in terms of the lowest, but of the highest, that the lowliest life ministered to and was to be comprehended in relation to the highest. And he saw, as perhaps the great intellect of Shakespeare did not see, the fundamental bene-
ficence of the world. All that we behold, he says, " is full of blessing," and he staked his faith to that. His successor in the Laureateship found his faith almost wrecked by ',`Nature, red in tooth and claw," and could only "faintly trust the larger hope." That was in the pre-Darwinian days, and the early study of Darwin seemed to confirm Tennysor's view in " In Memoriam." But science is diving into a far deeper sea, and the mind, bent on a profounder view of things, is now declaring for Wordsworth's standpoint as against that of Tennyson's earlier mood. No possible living world, says Alfred Russel Wallace, could give such ex- tended and general joy as the world of actuality ; and if only the cloud of evil could be rolled away from mankind, if we could be delivered from our lower selves and our social life be made clean and jest, we should probably discover that everything was beautiful in its season, and that the apparent deformities of the world were the creation of human egotism and lust. We say nothing here of the many services rendered by Wordsworth to the humanising of life,—his reverence for lowly, honest toil, his love of the poor, his discovery of the great elements of pathos and tragedy in the humblest lives, his finding of love " in the huts where poor men lie,'? though in all these elements of his poetry he was a pioneer in the best and happiest work now being done for the good of mankind. We are content to rest Wordsworth's immortal fame on his con• secreted task of marrying man to Nature in a far deeper sense than did the old Nature-worship of Greece, on his revelation of this marvellous unity in which we live. He saw in vision, to take his own characteristic language, the very pomp of heaven lighting " on ground which British shepherds tread." We should be inclined to appraise the true inner nature of any well-read and cultivated Englishman by his attitude to Wordsworth.
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