A Classic Reputation

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB.

MR. MATTHEW ARNOLD bids us beware of two things in our estimates of literary works, — the bias given to our minds by historical considerations and the bias caused by personal sympathy. I cannot but think that the reputation of Wordsworth’s poetry has been increased in just this way. His share in that epoch-making book, the Lyrical Ballads, secured him an important place in the history of English poetry, and I believe that both an historical and a personal bias must be allowed for in the judgment passed upon his work by many critics. It is noteworthy, however, that no poet who has been ranked so high by competent critical authorities has at the same time met with such severe disparagement of so large a portion of his work. Let me put together some of the judgments which agree in praise and some of those which agree in dispraise, and see what impression we shall gather from the whole. Mr. Arnold " firmly believes that, after Shakespeare and Milton, Wordsworth’s poetical performance is undoubtedly the most considerable in our language, from the Elizabethan age to our own.”That cultivated writer, Mr. Ingleby, speaks of the “ considerable quantity ” of Wordsworth’s poetry which incontestably proves him one of the greatest poets of the century. I cannot quote any single sentence from Mr. R. H. Hutton’s sympathetic and discriminating criticism, but every page of his essay testifies to his thorough appreciation of Wordsworth’s unique power, and his citations are the happiest I have seen.

Our estimate of a poet should, no doubt, be qualitative, not quantitative, yet I think we cannot disregard quantity when we consider Wordsworth’s relative rank, as Mr. Arnold does. Remembering the short time given to Shelley, Byron, and Keats to work in, and the length of years—between fifty and sixty — during which the poet of Rydal labored, the wonder is how, in mere bulk, there can be any comparison between them. It seems to me the proportion of superior work in Shelley and Byron is greater than in Wordsworth. His sincerest admirers agree as to the necessity for leaving out of the account much the larger part of Wordsworth’s poetical performance. But, they say, the remainder is of such transcendent merit as to gain for him the most exalted place in modern poetry. This judgment is one I must question. Upon no poet has the same anxious care been bestowed — by others, not himself — to separate the gold from the dross, and bring to clearest view all that is best in his work. Taking this small residue of Wordsworth’s choicest verse, what is there in it that constitutes it of such incomparable worth? The “ noble and profound application of ideas to life” Mr. Arnold makes the test of the truest poetry. Noble, Wordsworth undoubtedly is, at his best, but is he even there always profound ? The passage beginning " Within the soul a faculty abides ” I grant is profoundly true and noble. The Ode to Duty belongs to the same class of meditative poetry, addressing itself to the best thought and instinct of men, and in form is as little didactic as Wordsworth could make it. Out of the hundreds of sonnets he composed, certain fine ones may be selected to add to the list of his best performance. If we take Three Years She Grew, the Boy of Windermere, and Daffodils, which, characteristic and fine as they are, can hardly be described as profound, we come to the end of the list of works that can in any sense be called great. The pleasing poems on Yarrow are not great nor specially characteristic. If one chooses to pronounce the Ode on Immortality profound, I do not know that I can argue a negative. I can only say I do not feel impressed by its profundity, though I recognize in it fine passages of verse. How the preponderance of reflection, the lack of passion, in Wordsworth contrast with Coleridge’s intellectual yet emotional poetry, such as Youth and Age and the Ode to Dejection! Alas that Coleridge’s working years were so few !

I believe that lovers of Wordsworth lend to his verse something beyond what it contains in itself, contributing out of the fullness of their own minds much they think they perceive. In the lines about “ the soothing thoughts that spring out of human suffering,” the poet does but imply that such thoughts there are, and what they are some readers are unable to imagine, while others easily supply all that is unsaid.

Mr. Hutton and Mr. Lowell agree as to Wordsworth’s lack of structural and dramatic power, and the latter adds, “ Of narrative power he has next to none.” His lack of spontaneity, also, they both admit. And it seems to me plainly evident that, in Mr. Lowell’s words, " more than with most poets poetry was with Wordsworth an art rather painfully acquired, needing a toilsome education of the ear.”

Productions that cost us much we are apt to value unduly, which partly accounts for Wordsworth’s overestimate of his own work. With the exception of some of the sonnets, where the imposition of strict form aided him in construction, there is hardly a perfect poem in Wordsworth’s whole seven volumes. The little poem called Daffodils, which to my mind has the charm so noticeably absent from most of Wordsworth’s verse, is really perfect, while in Three Years She Grew we are able to choose some stanzas as excelling the rest. As Mr. Hutton observes, Wordsworth did not paint nature; his role was that of interpreter ; but in the short poem just referred to the poet does, for once, paint the “ jocund company ” for our eye before suggesting the thought of the “ inward bliss ” which is to be ours through memory. After all, as Mr. Lowell says, works of literary art must be judged by reference to their literary qualities, and how little of the form, the body, of pure poetry is there in Wordsworth ! The lack of art-form is the defect which prevents much of Mr. Browning’s true thought from ranking with the finest poetry, even with the poetry of smaller men. The many severe criticisms passed upon so much of Wordsworth’s verse I do not repeat here, because I wish to quote only such strictures as apply to his work as a whole ; the qualifications that have to be made with regard to his best poems, not his worst. While on this question of art-form, I must note a signal proof of the large, the prevailing element of prose in Wordsworth’s mind. The piece called Ellen Irwin is his version of the tragic story elsewhere embodied in the lyric of Fair Helen. Those unacquainted with the latter will find it in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. Fair Helen seems to me unsurpassed for poetic power ; and on reading these two poems, the question at once arises why Wordsworth wanted to meddle with a subject already treated so admirably, and, as it might have appeared, once for all. Compare the concentrated passion of Fair Helen, uttering itself in one heartbroken cry of mingled rage and grief, with the tame feeling and bald statement of Wordsworth’s lines, to say nothing of their false rhymes. I cannot think any other poet could have been guilty of such a parody. But Wordsworth’s conviction of his vocation and mission made him unable to conceive that he was not the equal of any writer in prose or verse, when he chose to challenge them. He wondered why Scott thought it worth while to write the novel of Rob Roy, after he himself had given to the world his verses on Rob Roy’s Grave, — a poem in no way remarkable except for two happy four-line stanzas.

Wordsworth, then, is not eminent for command of artistic form, and it seems clear that his defect in this respect was due partly to poverty of natural endowment, and partly to a false theory of poetic production. Even Mr. Hutton cannot refrain from a gibe at the poet’s reasoning in defense of certain of his works, — a reasoning, he remarks, which would have equally justified Wordsworth in sitting down to write a touching sonnet on the Illicit Process of the Major. As he also admits, the poet " directed ” his imagination too much, and constructed pedestals not broad enough for the thoughts they were meant to sustain. Mr. Arnold says that Wordsworthians praise their favorite poet for the wrong thing ; less for the pure poetry which is reality than for the so-called philosophy which is illusion. And Mr. Hutton observes, to the same effect, that for so contemplative a poet there was " singularly little of the comprehensive grasp of Reason in Wordsworth’s mind, which was too concentrated, too intense, for general Truth, and that he had still less power of expressing universal emotions.”

If we admit, in accordance with the critics from whom I have quoted, that Wordsworth had no spontaneity or passion, no structural dramatic or narrative powers, no large command of art-form, no grasp of reason or capacity to deal with universal emotions, is this not to say that Wordsworth Was deficient in almost all the greater poetic qualities ? And that, again, is equivalent to saying that so far from being a great poet, as that epithet is commonly applied, he was a poet great only in a special, very limited field. There were whole tracts of life he never surveyed and sources of emotion and action he never explored, so that the “ application of ideas to life,” the poet’s function, was in him reduced pretty much to this : a power of spiritual interpretation of Nature and her influences on the soul of man, and of depicting a certain order of thought and kind of emotion not common to men in general, but only to those of rarer sensibilities. " In all his many contemplations of character there is no variety of moral influences ; ” and it is noticeable that while nature was his favorite theme, there is no whole landscape in his poems. Without wishing to undervalue the gift which Wordsworth at his best has to offer, I feel that even where he is strongest he yet in some measure defeats his own purpose by the too constant habit of “resolutely withdrawing his mind,” and the reader’s, from the more obvious suggestions of natural scenes and objects, and forcibly turning toward the most inward and spiritual influences that flow therefrom.

In the poem on the Nightingale he seems to me perversely moral. I think that other poets bring to us the healing and uplifting power as well as the sensuous delight of nature when they paint it, not in the sense of cataloguing it, but by re-presenting it, in such fashion that we not merely see it, but feel the joy of it as we have felt it, — or as we might not feel it without the poet’s aid. Wordsworth’s Skylark almost seems to have been written for the sake of the two concluding lines, the poet seizing upon the bird as furnishing a text for the brief pointing of a moral. Shelley’s Skylark (which I have dared to criticise as too long, too packed with imagery) has verses in it which stir us with the same thrill of delight as would the actual vision of the bird, almost lost in the pale purple even melting round its flight. Take some of Mr. Arnold’s poetry, where he paints, to use his own phrase, with his eye on the object itself, not on the spiritual lesson it discloses, but, as Mr. Hutton remarks, in the most restful way possible, and note how the external scene is set before us with the most exquisite lucidity, ease, and tenderness.

I think that one who loves Nature with the passion that ever grows in depth and strength, and knows her power to console and sustain by suggestion of an abiding peace and joy whose source is beyond herself, — such a one feels that her influences have reached his inmost soul less by reflection and “resolute withdrawing ” of the mind into special channels of thought than by letting her beauty sink silently in through the eye to the spirit. Within us is the pain of life’s experience, without is the joy of earth’s beauty ; and we let the two currents of thought and feeling mingle and flow together through the soul.

In his latest utterance on Wordsworth Mr. Lowell says : “ He is great and surprising in passages and ejaculations. When at his best he startles and waylays as only genius can, but he is the furthest from that equanimity of constantly indwelling power that is the characteristic of the greatest work. . . . The limited circle to whom he appeals feel his power to a degree that makes them fanatical. The universal poets call out none of this fanaticism. . . . Will Wordsworth be known a century hence as the author of remarkable passages ? ”

If a century hence men will be at the pains of searching through the seven volumes of his production, they will come upon passages remarkable as intrinsically precious, and also as surprises hidden away like glinting bits of pure ore among masses of hard rock or dull earth.