Part 110 (1/2)
74. _Sir Walter Scott_.
EXTRACT OF LETTER TO MRS. HEMANS.
Rydal Mount, Aug. 20. 1833.
The visit which occasioned the poem ['Yarrow Revisited'] addressed to Sir Walter Scott, that you mention in terms so flattering, was a very melancholy one. My daughter was with me. We arrived at his house on Monday noon, and left it at the same time on Thursday, the very day before he quitted Abbotsford for London, on his way to Naples. On the morning of our departure he composed a few lines for Dora's Alb.u.m, and wrote them in it. We prize this memorial very much, and the more so as an affecting testimony of his regard at a time when, as the verses prove, his health of body and powers of mind were much impaired and shaken. You will recollect the little green book which you were kind enough to write in on its first page.
Let me hope that your health will improve, so that you may be enabled to proceed with the sacred poetry with which you are engaged. Be a.s.sured that I shall duly appreciate the mark of honour you design for me in connection with so interesting a work.[121]
[121] _Memoirs_, ii. 244.
75. _Of Advices that he would write more in Prose_.
LETTER TO REV. J.K. MILLER, VICAR OF WALKERINGHAM.
Rydal Mount, Kendal, Dec. 17. 1831.
MY DEAR SIR,
You have imputed my silence, I trust, to some cause neither disagreeable to yourself nor unworthy of me. Your letter of the 26th of Nov. had been misdirected to Penrith, where the postmaster detained it some time, expecting probably that I should come to that place, which I have often occasion to visit. When it reached me I was engaged in a.s.sisting my wife to make out some of my mangled and almost illegible MSS., which inevitably involved me in endeavours to correct and improve them. My eyes are subject to frequent inflammations, of which I had an attack (and am still suffering from it) while that was going on. You would nevertheless have heard from me almost as soon as I received your letter, could I have replied to it in terms in any degree accordant to my wishes. Your exhortations troubled me in a way you cannot be in the least aware of; for I have been repeatedly urged by some of my most valued friends, and at times by my own conscience, to undertake the task you have set before me. But I will deal frankly with you. A conviction of my incompetence to do justice to the momentous subject has kept me, and I fear will keep me, silent. My sixty-second year will soon be completed, and though I have been favoured thus far in health and strength beyond most men of my age, yet I feel its effects upon my spirits; they sink under a pressure of apprehension to which, at an earlier period of my life, they would probably have been superior. There is yet another obstacle: I am no ready master of prose writing, having been little practised in the art. This last consideration will not weigh with you; nor would it have done with myself a few years ago; but the bare mention of it will serve to show that years have deprived me of _courage_, in the sense the word bears when applied by Chaucer to the animation of birds in spring time.
What I have already said precludes the necessity of otherwise confirming your a.s.sumption that I am opposed to the spirit you so justly characterise.[122] To your opinions upon this subject, my judgment (if I may borrow your own word) 'responds.' Providence is now trying this empire through her political inst.i.tutions. Sound minds find their expediency in principles; unsound, their principles in expediency. On the proportion of these minds to each other the issue depends. From calculations of partial expediency in opposition to general principles, whether those calculations be governed by fear or presumption, nothing but mischief is to be looked for; but, in the present stage of our affairs, the cla.s.s that does the most harm consists _of well-intentioned_ men, who, being ignorant of human nature, think that they may help the thorough-paced reformers and revolutionists to a _certain_ point, then stop, and that the machine will stop with them.
After all, the question is, fundamentally, one of piety and morals; of piety, as disposing men who are anxious for social improvement to wait patiently for G.o.d's good time; and of morals, as guarding them from doing evil that good may come, or thinking that any ends _can_ be so good as to justify wrong means for attaining them. In fact, means, in the concerns of this life, are infinitely more important than ends, which are to be valued mainly according to the qualities and virtues requisite for their attainment; and the best test of an end being good is the purity of the means, which, by the laws of G.o.d and our nature, must be employed in order to secure it. Even the interests of eternity become distorted the moment they are looked at through the medium of impure means. Scarcely had I written this, when I was told by a person in the Treasury, that it is intended to carry the Reform Bill by a new creation of peers. If this be done, the const.i.tution of England will be destroyed, and the present Lord Chancellor, after having contributed to murder it, may consistently enough p.r.o.nounce, in his place, its _eloge funebre_!
[122] As revolutionary.
I turn with pleasure to the sonnets you have addressed to me and if I did not read them with unqualified satisfaction it was only from consciousness that I was unworthy of the enconiums they bestowed upon me.
Among the papers I have lately been arranging are pa.s.sages that would prove as forcibly as anything of mine that has been published, you were not mistaken in your supposition that it is the habit of my mind inseparably to connect loftiness of imagination with that humility of mind which is best taught in Scripture.
Hoping that you will be indulgent to my silence, which has been, from various causes, protracted contrary to my wish,
Believe me to be, dear Sir, Very faithfully yours, WM. WORDSWORTH.[123]
[123] _Memoirs_, ii. 252-4.
76. _Of Poetry and Prose: Milton and Shakspeare: Reform, &c._
LETTER TO PROFESSOR HAMILTON, DUBLIN.
Nov. 22. 1831.
MY DEAR MR. HAMILTON,
You send me showers of verses, which I receive with much pleasure, as do we all; yet have we fears that this employment may seduce you from the path of Science, which you seem destined to tread with so much honour to yourself and profit to others. Again and again I must repeat, that the composition of verse is infinitely more of an art than men are prepared to believe; and absolute success in it depends upon innumerable minutiae, which it grieves me you should stoop to acquire a knowledge of. Milton talks of 'pouring easy his unpremeditated verse.' It would be harsh, untrue, and odious, to say there is anything like cant in this; but it is not true to the letter, and tends to mislead. I could point out to you five hundred pa.s.sages in Milton upon which labour has been bestowed, and twice five hundred more to which additional labour would have been serviceable. Not that I regret the absence of such labour, because no poem contains more proofs of skill acquired by practice.
These observations are not called out by any defects or imperfections in your last pieces especially: they are equal to the former ones in effect, have many beauties, and are not inferior in execution; but again I do venture to submit to your consideration, whether the poetical parts of your nature would not find a field more favourable to their exercise in the regions of prose: not because those regions are humbler, but because they may be gracefully and profitably trod with footsteps less careful and in measures less elaborate. And now I have done with the subject, and have only to add, that when you write verses you would not fail, from time to time, to let me have a sight of them; provided you will allow me to defer criticism on your diction and versification till we meet. My eyes are so often useless both for reading and writing, that I cannot tax the eyes and pens of others with writing down observations which to indifferent persons must be tedious.