MATTHEW ARNOLD has said that Wordsworth's greatness lies in the fact that he deals with life and deals with it so powerfully; and that he deals with life because he deals with that in which life really consists, that his poetry is great because of the extraordinary power with which he feels the joy offered to us in nature, the joy offered to us in the simple elementary affections and duties; because of the extraordinary power with which, in case after case, he shows us this joy and renders it so as to make us share it and that the source of joy from which Wordsworth draws is the truest and most unfailing source of joy accessible to man, and it is accessible universally. And thus, and thus, Mr. Arnold points his moral in his preface to his own edition of Wordsworth's poems. Wordsworth, he says, brings us word, in his own strong and characteristic line, “of joy in widest commonalty spread." But Wordsworth, in the opinion of the present writer, does something else and more than this. Joy in widest commonalty spread is a common joy which every one can feel, which is open to all of us; but there is a joy of a more exceptional kind, a joy of aspect more sublime, felt in the blood, and felt along the heart, "that blessed mood, in which the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world is lightened, until, the breath of this corporeal frame, even the motion of our human blood, almost suspended, we are laid asleep in body and become a living soul; while with an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things." It is this high mood of cosmic emotion which gives to Wordsworth and his poetry their highest worth and characteristic note of ecstasy, of compassionate wonder for the working and being of human nature amid the terrors and sublimities which envelop it. To the man of the world, living in an environment which is his own creation or under his own control, and so familiar to him and deprived of, or wanting in, the awe or admiration inspired by nature's sublimities or felicities, much if not all the poetry of Wordsworth will seem absurd or tame or even silly; for example, the crucial " primrose by a river's brim," or "A simple child": and the "impulse from a vernal wood" will seem, even to Lord Morley, to be no more than a "playful sally," for, of moral evil or of good, an impulse from a vernal wood can teach us, says Lord Morley, absolutely nothing; and yet it is precisely the supreme belief of Wordsworth that it may, and does, teach us more of man, of moral evil and of good," than all the sages can." For indeed to the poetic imagination of Wordsworth, at the height of that blessed mood in which he sees into the life of things, the knowledge of moral evil and of good is seen to have its primal instinct, its fountain light, in the temper of the universe, in the temper immanent in itself and emanant from all its sublime and beautiful creations. Not 'mid the world's vain objects that enslave The freeborn Soul-that World whose vaunted skill Whose factions lead astray the wise and brave— And through the human heart explore my way; In "A simple child" again, we are at the very heart of Wordsworth's emotion, his immense daring and dawnlike purity of primitive vision: in the soul of the child he is face to face with Nature, as Nature may be imagined to have seemed before it had been interpreted by the after questioning of man. His own insistent question is one of Nature's first. He and the child together are the infinite and the finite. And the charm of the poem is the is the presentment of Nature ignorant of itself, the child mind unawakened, before the years have brought the inevitable yoke, like the blind child of Millais so radiantly illumined * Composed while the author was engaged in writing a tract occasioned by the Convention of Cintra. in a world of which it has no vision. What should it know of Death! A perfect presentment, a perfect poem. And the "primrose by a river's brim"! Have we all of us then, and not Peter only, so little imaginative sympathy that we cannot appreciate, as Wordsworth appreciates, the infinite tenderness of the infinitely great, of the infinitely great which, from out the infinite and amid its own stupendous tasks, stoops to strew the path of man, the infinitely little, the path of man with sunshine and with flowers ? It is to this high emotion, to this cosmic sympathy, beyond the comprehension of the world at its ordinary temperature, and to the great Nature, "embodied in the mystery of words," where "even forms and substances are circumfused by that transparent veil with light divine, and through the turnings intricate of verse present themselves as objects recognised, in flashes, and with glory not their own," that I dedicate this Anthology. It is arranged, as far as I have been able to arrange it, at once to show, in Part I, the fact and the growth of Wordsworth's own early awakened cosmic emotion, "the glory and the dream" and in Part V, its transformation beneath an eye that hath kept watch o'er man's mortality, and finds in the meanest flower that blows thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. In the intervenient Parts, II, III, and IV, are arranged the moments at which the poet, mindful of the vast All of Time and Space, is poised in concentrated contemplation of case after case" of joy, of sorrow, of expectation and despair, of heroic magnanimity and of sublime ECSTASIS. The Poet was born at Cockermouth, in Cumberland, on April 7, 1770. He died at Rydal Mount, in Westmorland, on April 23, 1850. The Poems are taken for the most part from the decade of years 1798 to 1808-a period which gives its title to the first edition of the Anthology published by The Doves Press in 1911. T. J. COBDEN-SANDERSON |