readers by the extent to which he had laid Wordsworth under contribution in the eponymous Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics. Further, on September 29th, 1880, a "Wordsworth Society" was constituted at Grasmere, with the Bishop of St Andrews for President, and for Secretary and moving spirit Professor William Knight, who has deserved so well of the poet. The Society held seven annual meetings, at which papers were read and discussion invited; it also published its transactions, which include, among many valuable brochures, the first Wordsworth bibliography. The successive Presidents, 1882-6, were Lord Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, His Excellency Russell Lowell, Lord Houghton, and Lord Selborne. The Society dissolved when it had completed its work of organising the labours of Wordsworthians. Those labours

are not yet done, for the world that is slow to appreciate is slow also to change; and day by day, though a generation has grown up since the centenary of Wordsworth's birth, the love and influence of the poet are widening. His name, it is felt, is written in the golden roll of the poets who are always young.

CHAPTER II

THE LONGER POEMS

The Borderers.

WORDSWORTH'S visits to France during the Revolution years were the consecration of his genius. They touched a visionary of the fields and woods to sympathy with humankind. They moved to numbers the inarticulate music that was within him by providing a subject adequate to his speculative powers, confined hitherto to a too narrow range of thought. But the earliest attempt which Wordsworth made to wed this newlyfound experience with his poetic faculty was by no means harmonious in its result. He wrote in 1795-6 a tragedy called The Borderers, an unique experiment in that form of composition with which he was never himself satisfied. Coleridge, indeed, to whom he read it at the time, praised it in extravagant terms, possibly through the bias of similar inspiration on his own part in The Remorse; for, historically speaking, The Borderers belongs to the beginning of the reaction of English drama from the formal and conventional to the sentimental and psychological school. Following his own judgment, Wordsworth laid it by for nearly fifty years, and it appeared for the first time among the "Poems, chiefly of Early and Late Years," of 1842. It added nothing to his reputation, a fact for which the poet was quite prepared. He acknowledges himself (1842) that its acting qualities had not been present to him during its production, "but," he adds, "not the slightest alteration has been made in the conduct of the

story or the composition of the characters; above all, in the two leading persons of the drama, I felt no inducement to make any change. The study of human nature suggests this awful truth, that, as in the trials to which life subjects us, sin and crime are apt to start from their very opposite qualities, so there are no limits to the hardening of the heart, and the perversion of the understanding to which they may carry their slaves. During my long residence in France... I had frequent opportunities of being an eyewitness of this process, and it was while that knowledge was fresh upon my memory that the tragedy of The Borderers was composed." Even so, taking the piece upon its own claim to merit as a study in the genesis of sin and in the inequalities of justice, it is not altogether a success. Its characterisation is unclear, and its treatment is unconvincing. With the most amenable disposition to the didactic purpose of the play, the reader is left perplexed. Wordsworth was grappling with a great idea, but the form which he chose was neither suitable to it nor consistent with itself.

The Prelude.

In admitting this failure, Wordsworth must be given the full credit of its long suspension from publication. He himself felt very deeply the need of testing his powers, of reviewing at leisure the effects of the severe and sudden discipline through which he had passed in France, and of deciding, in the light of this review, the proper scope for his muse. This careful determination of the form which the circumstances of his discipline would impose, a determination preliminary to the work of his life, and insuring for it an accurate proportion between endeavour and achievement, a determination, it must be added, which in minor poets is mainly a matter of imitation, is embodied in the poem appropriately called The Prelude. It is char

D

actensi o “Wordsworth, not only that his poetic conscience dizzata this ass bar aise that he withheld it from the ruck. imti the age work should have been given to the WOTL The work designed as The Recluse, in three jarris. n which The Exarsin is the second, was never conmetet, and t was not until 18, the last year of Wordsworth's lit that he consented to publish The Presade, what should have been hit now never could be, the motove and justification, the ante chapel" of the “Gothic

Critics, therefore, who have seen in The Borderers a premature trial of skin display beter judgment than those who have regarded The Prein as uncalled-for or selfconceited. It is, on the contrary, a beautiful example of the diffidence of creative genius. It stands alone in poetry as an idealised employment of the conventional invocation, by which a formal means is commonly found of detaching the muse from the scribe, and claiming the privilege of inspiration. Wordsworth genuinely, almost painfully, realised the burthen of preparation which such detachment requires. He searched the sources of his message, that he might fit it to the most convincing form. But The Prelude is more than this, more than the record in verse of "the growth of a poet's mind," wherein to discover its limits and its powers. Its biographical interest passes into the experience of humanity. Its invocation is no more personal, but universal-the client not Wordsworth, but mankind; the gift not poetry, but conduct. This success was not a matter of accident, for a man does not happen upon the categorical imperative mood by chance. It was by the closest and most painstaking selfexamination, by an industrious abstraction of every element in his experience of accident or chance, that Wordsworth's

record became a universal law. The even course of The Prelude, illuminated at intervals by passages of transcendent insight which make, as it were, their own music, becomes the best way of life-from the finality of youthful acquirement through the disillusion of worldly wisdom to the peace of the "years that bring the philosophic mind."

The Prelude, which was inscribed to S. T. Coleridge, is written in blank verse, reminiscent of Milton, though usually less majestic, owing to a less fastidious vocabulary and to a more numerous flow of metre. It received the advantage of the author's corrections during the greater part of his life, the final revision being in 1832. It is divided into thirteen books, of which ix., x. and xi. have the most historical interest, as covering the short period when Wordsworth moved in the midst of the movement of the world. The higher theme of the whole, the theme that comes inevitably forward through reflection on the facts of experience, is the equal spirit of joy running through all creation. The first two books deal with the influence of natural objects upon boyhood, while nature is still "intervenient and secondary," not sought for her own sake. The winds and cataracts and mountains are perceived with a kind of sixth sense, which, "in the dawn of being, constitutes a bond of union between life and joy." Wordsworth discovers an affinity between our sense-perception and the organic beauty of the world which is conceded as a favour of reconcilement or consolation to our instinctive demand for joy. The joy comes later, with the reason of after-life; but because the treatment in these books is retrospective,* a suggestion is made throughout of the change in standard that is to be. Meanwhile, it may be noted that it is to the strength of this sense that

* Cp. pp. 5 and 6, supra.