Dirge for Wolfram (from Death's Jest Book, Act ii) Song (from Torrismond, Sc. iii) Amala's Bridal Song (from Death's Jest Book, Act iv) Athulf's Song (from Death's Jest Book, Act iv) Sailor's Song (from Death's Jest Book, Act i) Hesperus Song (from The Bride's Tragedy, Act i) 'Not Chaos, not The darkest pit of lowest Erebus, Nor aught of blinder vacancy, scooped out By help of dreams-can breed such fear and awe Into our minds, into the mind of man My haunt, and the main region of my song. Which craft of delicate spirits hath composed An hourly neighbour. Paradise, and groves Or a mere fiction of what never was? And the creation (by no lower name Can it be called) which they with blended might Wordsworth's poetry and his idea of the office of poetry must be traced, like many other remarkable things, to the French Revolution. He very early, even in his boyhood, became aware of that sympathy with external nature, and of that power of discriminating insight into the characteristic varieties of its beauty and awfulness, which afterwards so strongly marked his writings. I recollect distinctly,' he says of a description in one of his early poems, 'the very spot where this struck me. The moment was important in my poetical history; for I date from it my consciousness of the infinite variety of natural appearances which have been unnoticed by the poets of any age or country, and I made a resolution to supply in some measure the deficiency.' We have abundant evidence how he kept his purpose. While Wordsworth was at Cambridge, the French Revolution was beginning. The contagion of the great ideas which it proclaimed caught him as it also laid hold on so many among the nobler spirits of the young generation. To him at that time, as he tells us himself, The whole earth The beauty wore of promise; that which sets The wonder, the sympathy, the enthusiasm which swept him and them away like a torrent, though in his case the torrent's course was but a short one, left ineffaceable marks on his character and his writings. He was not at first so easily shocked as others were at the excesses of the revolution. His stern Northcountry nature could bear and approve much terrible retribution for the old wrongs of the poor and the weak at the hands of nobles and kings. In his Apology for the French Revolution, 1793, he sneered at Bishop Watson for the importance which the Bishop attached to 'the personal sufferings of the late royal martyr,' and for joining in the 'idle cry of modish lamentation which has resounded from the court to the cottage': and he boldly accepted the doctrine that in a time of revolution, which cannot be a time of liberty, 'political virtues are developed at the expense of moral ones.' But though the guillotine and the revolutionary tribunal had not daunted him, he recoiled from the military despotism and the fever of conquest in which they ended. The changes in his fundamental principles, in his thoughts of man and his duties, were not great: the change in his application of them and in his judgment of the men, the parties, the institutions, the measures, by which they were to be guarded and carried out, was great indeed. The hopes and affections which revolutionary France had so deeply disappointed were transferred to what was most ancient, most historic, most strongly rooted by custom and usage, in traditional and unreformed England. With characteristic courage he never cared to apologise for a political change which was as complete and striking as a change to a new religion. He scarcely attempted directly to explain it. He left it to tell its own story in his poetical creations, and in the elaborate pictures of character, his own and others', inserted into his longer works, The Prelude and The Excursion. But he was not a man to change with half a heart. He left behind him for ever all the beliefs and anticipations and illusions which, like spells, had bound him to Jacobin France. He turned away from it in permanent and strong disgust, and settled down into the sturdy English Tory patriot of the beginning of the century. But this unreserved and absorbing interest in the wonderful ideas and events of the French Revolution, transient as it was, had the effect upon him which great interruptions of the common course of things and life have on powerful natures. They were a call and a strain on his intellect and will, first in taking them in, then in judging, sifting, accepting or refusing them, which drew forth to the full all that he had of strength and individual character. But for that, he might have been, and doubtless would have been, the poet of nature, a follower, but with richer gifts, of Thomson, Akenside, perhaps Cowper. But it was the trial and the struggle which he went through, amid the hopes and overthrows of the French Revolution, which annealed his mind to its highest temper, which gave largeness to his sympathies and reality and power to his ideas. Every one knows that Wordsworth's early poetry was received with a shout of derision, such as, except in the case of Keats, has never attended the first appearance of a great poet. Every one knows, too, that in a quarter of a century it was succeeded by a growth of profound and enthusiastic admiration, which, though it has been limited by the rise of new forms of deep and powerful poetry, is still far from being spent or even reduced, though it is expressed with more discrimination than of old, in all who have a right to judge of English poetry. This was the inevitable result of the characteristic qualities of Wordsworth's genius, though for a time the quarrel between the poet and his critics was aggravated by accidental and temporary circumstances. Wordsworth is destined, if any poet is, to be immortal; but immortality does not necessarily mean popularity. That in Wordsworth which made one class of readers find in him beauty, grandeur, and truth, which they had never found before, will certainly tell on the same class in future years : 'What he has loved, Others will love, and he will teach them how.' |