II THE GENIUS OF WORDSWORTH THE commonplace modern criticism on Wordsworth is that he is too transcendental. On the other hand, the criticism with which he was first assailed, which Coleridge indignantly repelled, and which is reflected in the admirable parody published among the "Rejected Addresses," was that he was ridiculously simple, that he made an unintelligible fuss about common feelings and common things. The reconciliation of these opposite criticisms is not difficult. He drew uncommon delights from very common things. His circle of interests was, for a poet, singularly narrow. He was a hardy Cumbrian mountaineer, with the temperament of a thoroughly frugal peasant, and a unique personal gift for discovering the deepest secondary springs of joy in what ordinary men either took as matter of course, or found uninteresting, or even full of pain. The same sort of power which scientific men have of studiously fixing their minds on natural phenomena, till they make these phenomena yield lessons and laws of which no understanding, destitute of this capacity for detaching itself entirely from the commonplace train of intellectual associations, would have dreamt, Wordsworth had in relation to objects of the imagination. He could detach his mind from the commonplace series of impressions which are generated by commonplace objects or events, resist and often reverse the current of emotion to which ordinary minds are liable, and triumphantly justify the strain of rapture with which he celebrated what excites either no feeling, or weary feeling, or painful feeling, in the mass of unreflecting men. Two distinct peculiarities, and rare peculiarities of character, chiefly assisted him in this-his keen spiritual courage, and his stern spiritual frugality. Though his poetry reads so transcendental, and is so meditative, there never was a poet who was so little of a dreamer as Wordsworth. There is volition and self-government in every line of his poetry, and his best thoughts come from the steady resistance he opposes to the ebb and flow of ordinary desires and regrets. He contests the ground inch by inch with all despondent and indolent humours, and often, too, with movements of inconsiderate and wasteful joy-turning defeat into victory, and victory into defeat. He transmutes sorrows into food for lonely rapture, as he dwells upon the evidence they bear of the depth and fortitude of human nature; he transmutes the periodic joy of conventional social occasions into melancholy as he recalls how "the wiser mind " "Mourns less for what age takes away Than what it leaves behind." No poet ever contrived by dint of "plain living and high thinking" to get nearer to the reality of such life as he understood, and to dispel more thoroughly the illusions of superficial impression. To this same result again the rare spiritual frugality of Wordsworth greatly contributed. Poets, as a rule, lust for emotion; some of the most unique poets-like Shelley and Byron in their very different ways-pant for an unbroken succession of ardent feelings. Wordsworth, as I shall try to show, was almost a miser in his reluctance to trench upon the spiritual capital at his disposal. He hoarded his joys, and lived upon the interest which they paid in the form of hope and expectation. This is one of the most original parts of his poetic character. It was only the windfalls, as one may say, of his imagination, the accidents on which he had never counted beforehand, the delight of which he dared thoroughly to exhaust. He paused almost in awe at the threshold of any promised enjoyment, as if it were a spendthrift policy to exchange the hope for the reality. A delight once over, he multiplied it a 1 thousandfold through the vision of "that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude." Spiritual thrift was at the very root of his soul, and this was one of his most remarkable distinctions among a race who, in spiritual things, are too often prodigals and spendthrifts. In these two characteristics lies sufficient explanation of the opposite views as to his simplicity as a poet. No poet ever drew from simpler sources than Wordsworth, but none ever made so much out of so little. He stemmed the commonplace currents of emotion, and often succeeded in so reversing them, that men were puzzled when they saw weakness transformed into power and sorrow into rapture. He used up successfully the waifs and strays of his imaginative life, reaped so much from opportunity, hope, and memory, that men were as puzzled at the simplicity of his delights as they are when they watch the occasions of a child's laughter. Thus there is no poet who gives to his theme so perfectly new a birth as Wordsworth. He does not discern and revivify the natural life which is in it; he creates a new thing altogether, namely, the life of thought which it has the power to generate in his own brooding imagination. I have already said that he uses human sorrow, for example, as an influence to stir up his own meditative spirit, till it loses its own nature and becomes "Sorrow that is not sorrow, but delight; To hear of, for the glory that redounds Therefrom to human kind and what we are." "" 1 And it is this strange transmuting power, which his meditative spirit exercises over all earthly and human themes, that gives to Wordsworth's poems the intense air of solitude which everywhere pervades them. He is the most solitary of poets. Of him, with far more point than of Milton, may it be said, in Wordsworth's own words, that "his soul was like a star, and dwelt apart." Of all English poems, his works are the most completely outside the sphere of Shakespeare's universal genius. In solitude only could they have originated, and in solitude only can they be perfectly enjoyed. It is impossible not to feel the loneliness of a mind which never surrenders itself to the natural and obvious currents of thought or feeling in the theme taken, but changes their direction by cool sidewinds from his own spiritual nature. Natural rays of feeling are refracted the moment they enter Wordsworth's imagination. It is not the theme acting on the man that you see, but the man acting on the theme. He himself consciously brings to it the spiritual forces which determine the lines of meditation; he evades, or, as I 1 Prelude, book xiii. p. 345. have insisted, even resists the inherent tendencies of emotion belonging to his subject; catches it up into his high spiritual imagination, and makes it yield a totally different fruit of contemplation to any which it seemed naturally likely to bear. It is in this that he differs so completely in manner from other selfconscious poets-Goethe, for instance, who in like. manner always left the shadow of himself on the field of his vision. But with Goethe it is a shadow of self in quite a different sense. Goethe watches himself drifting along the tide of feeling, and keeps an eye open outside his heart. But though he overhears himself, he does not interfere with himself; he listens breathlessly, and notes it down. Wordsworth, on the other hand, refuses to listen to this natural self at all. He knows another world of pure and buoyant meditation; and he knows that all which is transplanted into it bears there a new and nobler fruit. With fixed visionary purpose he snatches away his subject from the influence of the lower currents it is beginning to obey, and compels it to breathe its life into that silent sky of conscious freedom and immortal hope in which his own spirit lives. Wordsworth has himself explained this fixed purpose of his imagination to stay the drift of common thoughts and common trains of feeling, and lift them up into the light of a higher meditative mood, in a passage of a remarkable letter to The Friend. It illustrates so curiously the deeper methods of his genius, that I must quote it : "A familiar incident may render plain the manner in which a process of intellectual improvement, the reverse of that which nature pursues, is by reason introduced. There never, perhaps, existed a school-boy who, having, when he retired to rest, carelessly blown out his candle, and |