Part 137 (1/2)

'But who is innocent? By grace divine, Not otherwise, O Nature, are we thine.'[272]

[272] 'Evening Voluntary.'

It was to Nature as first created, not to Nature as corrupted by 'disnatured' pa.s.sions, that his song had attributed such high and healing powers. In singing her praise he had chosen a theme loftier than most of his readers knew--loftier, as he perhaps eventually discovered, than he had at first supposed it to be. Utterly without Shakspeare's dramatic faculty, he was richer and wider in the humanities than any poet since Shakspeare. Wholly unlike Milton in character and in opinions, he abounds in pa.s.sages to be paralleled only by Milton in solemn and spiritual sublimity, and not even by Milton in pathos. It was plain to those who knew Wordsworth that he had kept his great gift pure, and used it honestly and thoroughly for that purpose for which it had been bestowed. He had ever written with a conscientious reverence for that gift; but he had also written spontaneously. He had composed with care--not the exaggerated solicitude which is prompted by vanity, and which frets itself to unite incompatible excellences; but the diligence which shrinks from no toil while eradicating blemishes that confuse a poem's meaning, and frustrate its purpose. He regarded poetry as an art; but he also regarded Art not as the compeer of Nature, much less her superior, but as her servant and interpreter. He wrote poetry likewise, no doubt, in a large measure, because self-utterance was an essential law of his nature. If he had a companion, he discoursed like one whose thoughts must needs run on in audible current; if he walked alone among his mountains, he murmured old songs. He was like a pine grove, vocal as well as visible. But to poetry he had dedicated himself as to the utterance of the highest truths brought within the range of his life's experience; and if his poetry has been accused of egotism, the charge has come from those who did not perceive that it was with a human, not a mere personal interest that he habitually watched the processes of his own mind. He drew from the fountain that was nearest at hand what he hoped might be a refreshment to those far off. He once said, speaking of a departed man of genius, who had lived an unhappy life and deplorably abused his powers, to the lasting calamity of his country, 'A great poet must be a great man; and a great man must be a good man; and a good man ought to be a happy man.' To know Wordsworth was to feel sure that if he had been a great poet, it was not merely because he had been endowed with a great imagination, but because he had been a good man, a great man, and a man whose poetry had, in an especial sense, been the expression of a healthily happy moral being.

AUBREY DE VERE.

Curragh Chase, March 31, 1875.

P.S. Wordsworth was by no means without humour. When the Queen on one occasion gave a masked ball, some one said that a certain youthful poet, who has since reached a deservedly high place both in the literary and political world, but who was then known chiefly as an accomplished and amusing young man of society, was to attend it dressed in the character of the father of English poetry, grave old Chaucer. 'What,' said Wordsworth, 'M. go as Chaucer! Then it only remains for me to go as M.!'

PART II.

SONNET--RYDAL WITH WORDSWORTH.

BY THE LATE SIR AUBREY DE VERE.

'What we beheld scarce can I now recall In one connected picture; images Hurrying so swiftly their fresh witcheries O'er the mind's mirror, that the several Seems lost, or blended in the mighty all.

Lone lakes; rills gus.h.i.+ng through rock-rooted trees: Peaked mountains shadowing vales of peacefulness: Glens echoing to the flas.h.i.+ng waterfall.

Then that sweet twilight isle! with friends delayed Beside a ferny bank 'neath oaks and yews; The moon between two mountain peaks embayed; Heaven and the waters dyed with sunset hues: And he, the Poet of the age and land, Discoursing as we wandered hand in hand.'

The above-written sonnet is the record of a delightful day spent by my father in 1833 with Wordsworth at Rydal, to which he went from the still more beautiful sh.o.r.es of Ulswater, where he had been sojourning at Halsteads. He had been one of Wordsworth's warmest admirers, when their number was small, and in 1842 he dedicated a volume of poems to him.[273] He taught me when a boy of 18 years old to admire the great bard. I had been very enthusiastically praising Lord Byron's poetry. My father calmly replied, 'Wordsworth is the great poet of modern times.'

Much surprised, I asked, 'And what may his special merits be?' The answer was, 'They are very various, as for instance, depth, largeness, elevation, and, what is rare in modern poetry, an _entire_ purity. In his n.o.ble ”Laodamia” they are chiefly majesty and pathos.' A few weeks afterwards I chanced to take from the library shelves a volume of Wordsworth, and it opened on 'Laodamia.' Some strong, calm hand seemed to have been laid on my head, and bound me to the spot, till I had come to the end. As I read, a new world, hitherto unimagined, opened itself out, stretching far away into serene infinitudes. The region was one to me unknown, but the harmony of the picture attested its reality. Above and around were indeed

[273] _A Song of Faith, Devout Exercises, and Sonnets_ (Pickering). The Dedication closed thus: 'I may at least hope to be named hereafter among the friends of Wordsworth.'

'An ampler ether, a diviner air, And fields invested with purpureal gleams;'

and when I reached the line,

'Calm pleasures there abide--majestic pains,'

I felt that no tenants less stately could walk in so lordly a precinct.

I had been translated into another planet of song--one with larger movements and a longer year. A wider conception of poetry had become mine, and the Byronian enthusiasm fell from me like a bond that is broken by being outgrown. The incident ill.u.s.trates poetry in one of its many characters, that of 'the deliverer.' The ready sympathies and inexperienced imagination of youth make it surrender itself easily despite its better aspirations, or in consequence of them, to a false greatness; and the true greatness, once revealed, sets it free. As early as 1824 Walter Savage Landor, in his 'Imaginary Conversation' between Southey and Porson, had p.r.o.nounced Wordsworth's 'Laodamia' to be 'a composition such as Sophocles might have exulted to own, and a part of which might have been heard with shouts of rapture in the regions he describes'--the Elysian Fields.

Wordsworth frequently spoke of death, as if it were the taking of a new degree in the University of Life. 'I should like,' he remarked to a young lady, 'to visit Italy again before I move to another planet.' He sometimes made a mistake in a.s.suming that others were equally philosophical. We were once breakfasting at the house of Mr. Rogers, when Wordsworth, after gazing attentively round the room with a benignant and complacent expression, turned to our host, and wis.h.i.+ng to compliment him, said, 'Mr. Rogers, I never see this house, so perfect in its taste, so exquisite in all its arrangements, and decorated with such well-chosen pictures, without fancying it the very house imaged to himself by the Roman poet, when, in ill.u.s.tration of man's mortality, he says, ”Linquenda est domus.”' 'What is that you are saying?' replied Mr.

Rogers, whose years, between eighty and ninety, had not improved his hearing. 'I was remarking that your house,' replied Wordsworth, 'always reminds me of the Ode (more properly called an Elegy, though doubtless the lyrical measure not unnaturally causes it to be included among Horace's Odes) in which the Roman poet writes ”Linquenda est domus;”

that is, since, ladies being present, a translation may be deemed desirable, _The house is_, or _has to be, left_; and again, ”et placens uxor”--and the pleasing wife; though, as we must all regret, that part of the quotation is not applicable on the present occasion.' The Town Bard, on whom 'no angle smiled' more than the end of St. James's-place, did not enter into the views of the Bard of the Mountains. His answer was what children call 'making a great face,' and the e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n, 'Don't talk Latin in, the society of ladies.' When I was going away he remarked, 'What a stimulus the mountain air has on the appet.i.te! I made a sign to Edmund to hand him the cutlets a second time. I was afraid he would stick his fork into that beautiful woman who sat next him.'

Wordsworth never resented a jest at his own expense. Once when we had knocked three times in vain at the door of a London house, I exclaimed, quoting his sonnet written on Westminster-bridge,

'Dear G.o.d, the very houses seem asleep.'

He laughed heartily, then smiled gravely, and lastly recounted the occasion, and described the early morning on which that sonnet was written. He did not recite more than a part of it, to the accompaniment of distant cab and carriage; and I thought that the door was opened too soon.