What Happened to Wordsworth?

by LAURENCE HOUSMAN

1

AMONG the great poets Wordsworth stands out pre-eminently as the one it is most easy to — laugh at, and sometimes the most difficult not to find dull. The forced extravagance of Shakespeare at his worst, the heavy pomposity of Milton at his worst, the self-conscious prettiness of Tennyson at his worst, do not provoke such general derision as the uninspired wordiness of Wordsworth when he had not the spirit with him.

In that respect he was even worse than St. Paul: for St. Paul did sometimes doubt (though not nearly often enough) whether the spirit was with him. Wordsworth never doubted. He had a colossal faith in himself and in his method; and a great deal of that faith, we see now, was built upon sand.

But can you have a religion — and poetry was to Wordsworth a religion — without its arid tracts, its dogmatisms which wear old as doth a garment? It is rather dangerous to base faith, or to write poetry, upon a system — for the prophet to think that he is always a prophet, the priest to think that he is always a priest, the poet that he is always a poet. Poetry and prophecy only come to a man — like a sore throat — occasionally. I think it was Yeats who declared that if an accepted poet manages to write one immortal poem in his life, he has done extremely well. (Perhaps Yeats calculated that that was his own measure. I should be inclined to give him one or two more.) Now, as I believe that Wordsworth has written several, — as I believe that, to name one form alone, he has written more good sonnets than Milton, and one or two even finer, — I hold that Wordsworth has done exceptionally well. Wordsworth produced too much matter—not merely matter that doesn’t matter, but dead matter, which matters adversely and weighs his reputation down, because (to some) it seems so much “all of a piece” with the rest.

But it is generally true that a poet cannot attain to high altitude, cannot become a mountain, without a lot of submerged dead-weight material for his topmost peak to rest on — that for full development the poet must be prolific in exercises. But he need not publish them. Unfortunately Wordsworth did; he reduced his poetry to a routine; and it was a just, though an unconscious, criticism of the results when an inhabitant of the Lake district remarked, after the poet’s death, that he supposed the widow would “carry on the business.”

She might almost have done so. The Wordsworth who really mattered had been only alive for brief intervals during the last forty years of his life. And that would seem to suggest that there was something wrong in his mind and method toward poetry.

But what is more significant is that, in spite of the routine in which his genius became submerged, Wordsworth’s fame stays undiminished; and thousands of people still flock to see his cottage who will not read his poetry.

Now that is a curious portent in human nature. There is something infectious about authentic greatness; it penetrates the general mind; when it is well-founded you cannot away with it. It even overcomes a little personal aversion. The general taste much prefers the poems of Macaulay to the poems of Wordsworth; but nobody goes to see the house where Macaulay lived, though in addition he wrote history in a way flattering to England’s national vanity. Somehow the world realizes that Macaulay does not count as Wordsworth counts.

Now if Wordsworth is as big as these considerations suggest, a wrong prominence has been given to the comic — the unconsciously comic — side of him. All that can be said against him — or almost all — is perfectly true; but it is comparatively unimportant, except that it may help to explain how that unfortunate comic element of prosiness came about, and to put it in its right place — to show why laughing at Wordsworth is not so fair as it is diverting.

There is a temptation for the average onlooker to enjoy certain forms of castigation, whether the recipient has quite deserved them or no. “It is good for us,” we are told by the psalmist, “to have been in trouble.” It may be equally good for us to have been in the pillory. You can pillory a man in a phrase that sticks to him forever after; and to the end of time it may be unfair to him, and you know that it is so; and yet you enjoy the phrase, and pass it on to posterity; and the poor man turns and turns in his grave like a worm that dieth not, in a fire that is not yet quenched.

Now Wordsworth (easy to laugh at, easy to find dull) is one of those great figures in literature who have been pilloried for us; and we have wickedly enjoyed seeing him pilloried, and shall, I suppose, go on doing so. His character is the kind of character which needs some sort of corrective to the awful seriousness with which he took himself; and the corrective readiest to hand is the pillory of caricature in which certain wits, provoked by his over-seriousness, have placed him.

Wordsworth is reported to have said, during some literary discussion upon style, “I could have written like Shakespeare, had I had a mind.” To which Lamb promptly replied: “Yes, it was the m-m-mind that was l-l-lacking!” And in that play on the word, Wordsworth stands pilloried forevermore.

Lamb was not being fair. We all know that Wordsworth had a great mind; we therefore know (if we take pains to think) that he was no fool, though he sometimes appears stupid. But when Wordsworth said that, he was saying something that was quite true. He did not say he could write better than Shakespeare — or as well; he said he could write like him. So can anybody who has the knack of literary imitation, once Shakespeare has shown him the way. Those who are not deep students of Shakespeare could be challenged with plenty of quotations from poets his contemporaries; and they would not be able to say whether the quotations were by Shakespeare or not. Even the experts continue to dispute as to what is and what is not by Shakespeare, in certain plays of mixed origin.

And yet Lamb’s pinprick has a good critical point to it: he pricked Wordsworth because the poet took himself with such comic seriousness, and the temptation to jump on him was irresistible.

2

SHAKESPEARE’S good taste in poetry was by no means impeccable; but he had the poetic sense so deeply and instinctively and fundamentally that he had no need to theorize about it as Wordsworth did. He used it often extravagantly, immoderately, ostentatiously — one could say a dozen other bad things about it and justify them all by quotation; but he did know what poetry was; and when he descended below his level, as he often did, he was still doing, in a loud-mannered fashion, the sort of thing which poetry sets out to do; his poetry, even when forced and bombastic, has that kind of exaltation or emotion which finds full expression in poetic form.

Now Wordsworth, in his sincere and persistent pursuit of natural expression as the right vehicle for poetic diction, had a mind which recognized with critical dislike the element of pretentiousness which goes with inflated language; and he preferred deflated language. Shakespeare, in his uninspired moments, used inflated language: Wordsworth, in his uninspired moments, used deflated language. Inflated language (having a sort of excitement about it) takes more people in; and there are plenty of people who think that a lot of Shakespeare’s windiest stuff is good merely because of its inflation.

But Wordsworth had set himself to discover a new beauty of poetic diction in natural expression, and sometimes he succeeded remarkably; and that being his aim, and his occasional achievement, he too, like Shakespeare, was driven to be all of a piece when inspiration failed. And where Shakespeare, in order to key his worst to the noble splendor of his best, put on cheap finery, Wordsworth, to be similarly in key with his best, had to wear homespun or go threadbare.

If Wordsworth had only had a little more sense of humor he might have escaped ridicule; but having none (or very little), he could not see reason where there was no reason — which is what humor helps us to do. It helps us to see, for instance, that unreasonable custom and unreasonable associations of words and phrases impose limits and restraints on poetic diction. For example, can one give any reason why it is so much easier in serious poetry to refer to the foot than the kneecap, to the cheek than the nose, to the thigh, or even to the buttock, than the calf or the shin; to the belly than to the stomach; and in love poetry, to the breast than to the chest? Or why any poet can speak of a man’s beard but has to leave mustache and whiskers forever unmentioned?

But Wordsworth had so little sense of humour, and was so abnormally reasonable in his choice of language, that he could not see why one word should be taken and the other word left. Nor can one give a definite reason; yet we know that it must be done till the back of present usage has been broken and a new association of words established ready for poet ic use.

And so Wordsworth, having thus pinned his faith to ordinary language, when he had once started to put his thoughts into metrical form, never quite knew where poetry ended and prosing began. He made the mistake of thinking, apparently, that when a man of high imaginative powers like himself set himself to imagine, all that came into his head was imaginative, or at least suitable material for the imagination to rest on. And so, wanting to find a rhyme for “life in every limb,” he did not run a hundred miles or die a hundred deaths rather than write “dear brother Jim,” but brazenly decided to address the poem to an imaginary brother Jim in order to get the rhyme! And there it sticks to this day, like a postage stamp used to mend the broken nose of a beautiful statue.¹ In some editions it is left out, editors rightly preferring the broken nose. A critic, who was challenged to suggest an amendment, stalwartly replied that

would have been better, Lucy being a much prettier name than Jim, and “juicy” a word so true to fact that Wordsworth could have had no reason for rejecting it.

But to say of that example that it was “Wordsworth all over” is not true: it was only that part of him which his sense of self-importance mistook for poetic importance. Wordsworth was so deeply interested, not merely in “the meanest flower that blows” but in all things of life, and in seeing life as a unity, that he did not sufficiently realize that poetry is not a universal receptacle for all and sundry, but rather a refiner’s fire; and that it is sometimes very important in poetry to get away, not from the meanest flower that blows, but from attracting any attention whatsoever toward that far less mean instrument through which the poem takes life and form — the ego of the writer himself.

3

A MEDITATIVE poet cannot avoid writing in the first person singular; but he need not continually embellish it with a self-conscious commentary, as Wordsworth was prone to do. There is a clear distinction: the unexplained “I,” without comment or direction as to its identity, makes a very proper appearance in poet ry; much of the best poetry in our language could not have been written without it. The five poems relating to Lucy are impeccable in that respect. But the explained “I,” the “I” that draws unnecessary attention to itself, is a terrible person, doing to the poem the immediate disservice of distracting it from the communicative and the all-embracing to the narrowly unimportant and particular. So long as one can read the “I” of a poem as speaking for the human mind — the symbol of first-hand emotion or expression — it does not intrude or dislocate. But if one has to keep thinking of that “I” as William Wordsworth, dressed in late Georgian mufti, then that “I” becomes a nuisance and an impediment.

When reading, for instance, a meditative poem such as the Lines on Tintern Abbey, with its nat ural environment of grass and trees, of sky and stream, one does not want to be reminded — one wants to forget — that it is Wordsworth, aged twenty-eight and already thinking himself a rather old man in his increase of experience and placidity, who is talking — not to others but to himself — all through the poem. And how difficult he makes it for one to get away from him! There, where one wants it least, one hears his ego, like a droning beetle, wheeling its flight from end to end of that otherwise perfect poem. In speaking of the influences of nature “on that best portion of a good man’s life, his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love,” he prefaces what follows with this jolting bit of self-reference: —

which surely would have been better if, with less self-consciousness, he had merely said: —

Well might he say elsewhere, “Tis with regret sincere I mention this”; but he did go on, unrepentantly, mentioning things like that to his life’s end, and his reputation has suffered in consequence.

Many years later Wordsworth goes to Florence — is confronted by the stone where Dante used to sit, and starts writing a poem about it. And you know — oh, yes, you know! — the moment he mentions it, not only that he did it, but that he is going to tell you that he did it: He sat on it. And he made that the climax of his poem!

That is the sort of thing one has to forgive Wordsworth: not for sitting on it — any silly tourist would do the same — but for thinking it worth while to write about it, and make it a crowning event. His excuse was that

And Wordsworth would have us believe it was the undying fire he was after—in order to extract warmth. All very well; but we don’t sit down upon our hearts. That act was symptomatic of a mistake Wordsworth was always making about what one may politely describe as his own individual and material center of gravity. He took himself so terribly seriously.

Wordsworth had an unfortunate tendency to explain matters, instead of leaving them to explain themselves. Poetry does not explain: it states. When poetry starts explaining itself, it tends to become prose; and unfortunately Wordsworth wrote a whole set of poems which might have appeared under the generic title, “Explanatory Poems.” Greater poets than Wordsworth have made the same mistake.

But however much Wordsworth may have made these prosy mistakes in practice, he wrote excellent sense as to his intentions, in his preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads where he says, for a conclusion: “I have no doubt that, in some instances, feelings, even of the ludicrous, may be given to my readers by expressions which appeared to me tender and pathetic. Such faulty expressions, were I convinced they were faulty at present, and that they must necessarily continue to be so, I would willingly take all reasonable pains to correct. But it is dangerous to make these alterations on the simple authority of a few individuals, or even of certain classes of men.”

The argument on that particular point is sound; but the verdict of time has been against him, and a great number of expressions which appeared to Wordsworth tender and pathetic have remained to posterity faulty and ludicrous.

In that preface from which I have just quoted, Wordsworth propounded a theory which was better in its logic than its practice: a theory, put quite simply, that ordinary speech, or “the language really used by men,” with a certain coloring of imagination added thereto, was the best vehicle for poetry: and guided by that theory he undoubtedly made some very beautiful poetry and opened the way for a new simplicity and directness of expression in poetry which had not been attempted before. I don’t think we realize sufficiently that, helped by his experimental failures, others have reached success perhaps without knowing from whom they derived.

In criticizing Wordsworth, therefore, we ought to remember that his reaction against verbiage in poetry has proved highly valuable to English verse. But there is no doubt that Wordsworth’s theory and practice, where the divergent strain was too great, let him down rather more obviously than other poets get let down when inspiration fails them — for the simple reason that other poets allow themselves to use frills for a disguise where Wordsworth went naked and unashamed.

4

IT is not easy, I suppose, for the young to like Wordsworth. But if they can get to understand the character of his mind, he may become an acquired taste —like broad beans and other good things which are of the earth earthy; for I suppose that to the young there is an earthy flavor about Wordsworth (earthy, not merely earthly) which makes him seem rather a vegetable poet, uneventful, unexciting—a rooted sort of human being whose very mind seems sedentary.

One can have no doubt, to begin with, that Wordsworth, when he set it free, had a great and adventurous mind — his new theory about poetic diction was itself adventurous. But when he didn’t set it free, when he let it become hobbled and hampered with the social superstitions of his day, it was less great and less adventurous. And the trouble is that he was more self-consciously important when his lesser ego — the ego of his opinions — intruded itself into his poems than when his great ego made itself felt without any self-reference whatever. But both the little and the big in him tended to make much use of the pronoun “ I.”

What, in the course of years, happened to Wordsworth’s mind, it seems, was this: when he started out, his poetic creed was an intuitive one, of a mystical and nature-worshiping character, having about it a touch of pantheism; nature was so much a part or aspect of deity that he had no thought to separate them, and he used no safeguarding circumlocutions to bring himself into conformity with the orthodoxy of his day. Now one may not agree with that kind of creed; but it does lend itself peculiarly well to what one may call the devotional poetry of nature, if for no other reason than that it is theologically unembarrassed.

But gradually, as he grew older, Wordsworth’s mind began to hedge—first politically, then theologically: to guard itself from the contemporary products — moral, social, and spiritual — of the revolutionary movement toward freedom which had first attracted him. And, as he hedged, he began to hold hedgerow opinions; and these opinions, conscientiously and even meticulously expressed, began to find a place in his poems. And just as he had once written poems based on intuition, so, in later life, he wrote poems — reams and reams of them — based on mere opinion.

When Wordsworth held an opinion (really held it) it became as sacred to him as if it were the inspired word of God; and there is a certain intellectual consistency in the idea that, if you are to write poetry on t he thrills of pleasure felt by a leaf or a bird, and deduce from those thrills a sort of universal holiness, you cannot be debarred from basing poems on the thrills of opinion in a man’s brain (especially if it be your own) and deducing holiness from those also.

And so Wordsworth’s opinions became for him fit subjects for sacred poetry; and you get, as a consequence, his horrible sonnet-sequence in defense of capital punishment, the argument of which tends to make you dislike God and man about equally; and his dogged résumé of Church history in the 132 “ Ecclesiastical Sonnets, ” so named, which I suppose nobody now troubles to read. And yet, here and there, you will find in them lines of beautiful poetry, where for a moment imagination takes the place of opinion.

Wordsworth was so bent on moral unity, consistency, on making life all of a piece under one reconciling law, that he could not refrain from putting all his opinions into verse and thinking that they made poetry. And his failure carries with it this lesson: that a poet had better not try to be logical. Let it come or let it go; logic and poetry are two different things.

When Shakespeare debated whether it was better “to take arms against, a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them,” he wrote what was, logically, nonsense, but it was good poetry. I don’t think Wordsworth ever let himself go in poetic simile so far from strict sense as that. If he had, his poetry might often have been better than it was.

Nevertheless Wordsworth’s main principle is worth considering. From the beginning he believed that what we regard as “ordinary” has more significance and value than the extraordinary; that the rule has in it more wisdom and beauty than the exception; and that if something of special value appears to be exceptional, it is only because humanity has not arrived at the wise rule on which it is based.

You might say, for instance, that his Leechgatherer was a man of exceptional nobility of character. I don’t think that is true. It is the exceptional nobility of the poem which makes us think so. Wordsworth has there staged a type so wonderfully that he stands out and becomes a great figure in literature — just as, in sculpture or painting, rough types of labor by Meunier or Jean François Millet become things of significant and permanent beauty.

It is the same with the story of Michael: Wordsworth had the strength, the truth of mind, to put before us a record of virtuous life without a happy ending — and without the consolations of religion; Michael is a strong, simple character which holds out unchanged when its fortunes and earthly happiness are shattered; it doesn’t talk sentiment, it doesn’t “take to religion”—it just holds on, endures patiently, and dies. And Wordsworth shows it to us as a thing of beauty. Life is the event, not the accidents of life.

The Old Cumberland Beggar, the two gypsy boys, are characters independent of morality, but they have a hold on life which makes them attractive; that t hey cheat and beg needlessly is a minor matter. Wordsworth was not writing an “Ode to Duty” when he commended them to our favor, not by moral precepts, but by making them appear pleasant. You may make sport of your fellow man, but you cannot make sport of nature so lightly, and without loss to the value of life.

Believing in the higher significance of ordinary things, Wordsworth was deeply moved by them — by things themselves more than by events; and at his best, by his transfiguring touch on the ordinary thing, he moves us more than do other poets in a like relation. For instance, it is quite an ordinary thing for people to go to sleep at night; and where they are congregated in large numbers they sleep in large numbers; nothing is more obvious, more ordinary. Then Wordswort h goes and stands on Westminster Bridge at dawn and tells us the obvious and the ordinary in a new way, with a beauty and solemnity of phrase which makes it take hold of us forever afterwards: —

5

IT is the unadorned beauty of Wordsworth’s diction, which is sometimes so astonishing, so perfectly satisfying, that goes far to justify a method that often resulted in failure; and it is because his failures have made many regard him as a poet lacking in technique that I am now making technical comparisons between him and acknowledged masters of style.

When Shakespeare sets himself to describe natural objects, he does not do it to suggest the latent unity in all forms of life, as Wordsworth does, but for dramatic effect. In Macbeth, Duncan, coming to the place of his doom, sees it in all innocence; —

And Banquo replies: —

This has its dramatic value; but for the rest, it merely registers nature objectively, paints a picture for a purpose, and has done with it. Wordsworth brings nature to a finer use; in a single phrase you feel how much deeper a significance it has for him than it had for Shakespeare.

he says, and you are thrilled into sympathy.

Or again: —

Take those two last lines, and realize how impossible it would have been for them to have been written by Shakespeare, or Spenser, or Milton, or whomever one may happen to think the greatest of his predecessors; and it will help one to measure the authentic greatness of Wordsworth.

For that great advance of sympathy with nature, the quiet, unadorned purity of style which Wordsworth reached in his happiest moments of inspiration was surely the best. It is so singularly free from mannerism, from that accent of individual self-importance which at other times fell on his work; so pure and unmannered and natural.

At its best his form is so pure that it rises to a style which seems to embrace the highest common factor of other styles. And coming on certain brief passages of other poets, where their individual style or mannerism is merged in the perfect blend of phrase and thought, dignified, simple, natural, breathing the music of sympathy between nature and man, I am inclined to say: “That might have been by Wordsworth!”

is not by Wordsworth, but by Keats.

Did that wonderful master of style ever write two lines more beautiful? And if they remind one of Wordsworth at his best, is not that a certificate of character, in the matter of style, to a poet who was so much the friend of all, and poetically — when all allowances have been made for him — so much his own worst enemy?

Apply to Wordsworth, for there is need, the charitable resolution of David Copperfield toward Steerforth, and “Think of him at his best.” And so that Wordsworth at his best may be the last word, here are eight lines of what, in their beauty and simplicity, were among his very best: —