I. WORDSWORTH, THE NATURALIST. WORDSWORTH, as a poet, stood upon the threshold of the nineteenth century, and may be looked upon as its first great seer in the realm of song. Not only was he distinct from his predecessors of the eighteenth century in the fact that he formed a new school, but the direct antagonism between his school and theirs was so severe that his personality and poetry were thrown into most original and unmistakable relief. The eighteenth-century poets were slavishly classic in their style, going back to heathen legend and to ancient history for their themes. They loved the halo of antiquity: the old world was the Valhalla from which they called forth their heroes, and the fabled past the paradise out of which they invoked their deities. Gods, kings, battles, feasts-these were the subjects of their rhymes, their treatment thereof being stiff, formal, and pedantic. They shunned the common-place as subject for song. The present-that which was around them and of them-was too flat, too stale, too unprofitable for their muse. With them scholarship asserted its supremacy over humanity-status was more than soul, and the glamour of environment incalculably greater than the disposition and the heart. Thus, the wide world of every-day life was shut out from their consideration; and the realms of poetry, hidden away in cottage life and in peasant character, received no glance from their eye, no record from their pen. Wordsworth reversed all this. He turned from history to Nature, and from classic legend to the every-day life of man. And what was more, he turned to Nature in her humblest dress, to Nature as she shyly showed herself in field and hedgerow, in daisy and in daffodil, in wayside pool and moorland pond. Not that he was a stranger to her grander, wilder moods. Far from it. For he, as no other poet, has painted her cloud-built citadels and flaming skies. He likewise approached man in his poverty and rags. The beggar, the leech-gatherer, the idiot girl, the worn widow-~ all these caught his eye, and touched his heart, and started forth the music from his lyre. His words concerning another may be truthfully applied to himself, and to his methods and themes: 'Love had he found in huts where poor men lie; The silence that is in the starry sky, The sleep that is among the lonely hills.' In that verse lies the key to Wordsworth's poetry; indeed, it may be inscribed over the portals of the great school of song which he established, and in which he has ever remained the central figure. He went back neither to great names nor to great deeds, but sought the men of his own age and in his own village; nor did he desire the glories of tropic climes or the gorgeous colours of Italian skies, but delighted in the mountain and moor that reared and stretched themselves around his Westmorland home. Wordsworth was pre-eminently fitted, both by disposition and environment, for the founding and perfecting of this great school of poetry. He was a man of simple mind and of simple habits. Crowds possessed no charm for him, nor was commerce congenial. For the greater part of his life a village was his home, a cottage his shelter, a handful of books his instructors; a sister and a wife his companions, and a few men, such as Southey, Coleridge, and De Quincey, his familiar friends. His passion was for rural sights and sounds, and it is computed that during his life he walked somewhere about 180,000 English miles. He lived in the open air. The country, in its silences and in its solitudes, was his library, his study, his heaven. He could not compose when closeted in his house, and as for inspiration, has he not said: And again: 'One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man, 'To me the meanest flower that blows can give What, however, was still more important was the position in which Wordsworth was kindly placed by fortune. Though never rich, he was saved from the pinching poverty that forces a man to trim his style to the demands of a reading public. Thus, he was enabled to follow his ideal, and patiently await his constituency. He permitted neither |
