WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
WORDSWORTH’S BIRTHPLACE IN THE LAKE REGION
WORDSWORTH’S MOTHER
By Margaret Gillies.
While these poets died before maturity, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning had ample time in which to harvest all the fruits of their genius. Wordsworth’s life was in striking contrast to the lives of his brilliant contemporaries. Born before them, he lived twenty-seven years after the oldest of them died. Byron was an extensive traveler, Shelley lived five years in Italy, and Keats’ last months were spent in the same country. Byron died in Greece, Shelley was drowned in the Gulf of Spezia (spet´-see-eh), and Keats came to the end of his sufferings in the little room that looks out on the Spanish steps which are gay with flowers in the Roman spring.
DOVE COTTAGE
At Town End, Grasmere.
GRASMERE CHURCH
With the exception of a brief residence in France and Germany, Wordsworth spent eighty years on English soil, and mainly in the Lake Country. He was born in the North, went to school in a little village near Lake Windermere, and spent his life at Grasmere and at Rydal Mount only three or four miles distant. His life was free from struggles, either mental or material, and was one of meditation and quiet growth. In contrast with Byron, he was a poet of reflection; unlike Shelley, he saw Nature as the intimate companion of the spirit; and he sought beauty in the simplicity of obscure lives and daily experience rather than in the richness of imagination or in that fairy land of mythology which laid its spell on Keats. He was deeply religious, and saw Nature as a revelation of the divine mind; a visible and material creation, penetrated and filled by the divine spirit. His years of inspiration were few; but his conscientious industry was untiring. In his creative moods he wrote some of the noblest and most perfect poetry in English; in his moods of faithful industry he wrote much thoughtful but unpoetic verse. In the latter class fall his long poems; in the former class fall many of his shorter pieces, in which lofty thought and deep feeling are fused in an art of exquisite simplicity and purity. “The Prelude” and “The Excursion” contain passages of great beauty; but they are valuable chiefly to students. In the ten years which followed the publication of the “Lyrical Ballads” in 1798 he wrote many poems which are for all people and for all time. Such poetry as “Lucy,” “To a Highland Girl,” “The Solitary Reaper,” “To a Cuckoo,” “I Wandered Lonely,” “She Was a Phantom of Delight,” “Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shade,” ought to be planted in the minds of children as refuges from the commonplace, and as a protection from all that is cheap and inferior in life and art. In the “Ode to Duty,” that on “Intimations of Immortality,” in many stanzas from the long poems, and in a group of sonnets, Nature and Life are interpreted in an art which is both commanding and beautiful. At his best, in depth of thought, loyalty to truth, spiritual insight, purity of feeling, and that simplicity which is the last achievement of art, Wordsworth belongs among the half-dozen great poets of England.
RYDAL MOUNT
Wordsworth’s home.
ALFOXDEN HOUSE
Wordsworth’s temporary home as it is now.
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
From the etching by Rajon.
ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
Photographed by Mrs. H. H. Cameron.
LADY TENNYSON
From a painting by G. F. Watts.
HALLAM, LORD TENNYSON
The son of the poet.
TENNYSON’S BEAUTIFUL HOME
Aldworth, at Haslemere, Surrey, England.
It is too soon to assign their permanent places to Tennyson and Browning; but there is little doubt of their survival among the singers whom the world will not forget. Both were fortunately born and well educated, though in different ways; both were happily situated in life; both had ample time in which to give full and rounded expression to their genius. Fame did not come early to either; but it discovered Tennyson in middle life, and for three or four decades it invested him with immense authority. Both were thinkers and students as well as singers, and both had ample intellectual resources. Tennyson was the finer artist; he was, indeed, one of the most perfect artists in the history of poetry. He had command of both harmony and melody; in other words, he could build a poem on strong constructive lines, and he could make it exquisitely musical. He mastered the resources of words; he knew how to use consonants and vowels so as to make his lines sing in the ear; he understood what can be done with assonance (resemblance in sound), repetition, alliteration. He was an expert workman; but never a mechanic alone. The stream of thought was not locked in poetic forms: it flowed freely through them. His art is so perfect that it conceals itself. He was not only a poet of exquisite skill, but he was a vigorous and independent thinker. The future historian of the intellectual and spiritual history of the nineteenth century will find “In Memoriam” what is called “an original authority” of far greater value than the formal records of the time. Some of the early short poems which captivated young readers in the ’30’s and ’40’s of the last century seem somewhat thin and artificial today; but the great mass of Tennyson’s poetry has substance as well as quality, and such poems as “Ulysses,” “Sir Galahad,” the “Two Voices,” have a noble reach of thought as well as a compelling music; while the magic which lives in “Break, Break, Break,” the songs from “The Princess,” “Crossing the Bar,” does not lose its spell. In power of thought, in deep religious feeling unbound by dogmatism, in faith in ordered liberty, in love of home, and in passion for beauty, Tennyson is the central figure of the Victorian Age.
ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
From a mezzotint by T. A. Barlow, after the painting by Sir John E. Millais, made in 1881.
ROBERT BROWNING
From a portrait painted at Rome in 1859 by Field Talfourd.
BROWNING’S HOME, 1887-9
De Vere Gardens, Kensington, London, England.
Browning is not so broadly representative of the movement of the age. He gave dramatic expression to one aspect of its experience; but that aspect was of thrilling interest. Tennyson did not miss the significance of individual impulse; but he saw men in ordered ranks, in social relations. He felt and expressed the collective experience of his age. Browning felt and expressed the experience of individual souls, of “Paracelsus,” “Luria.” He is the interpreter of exceptional experiences and natures, of “Abt Vogler,” Andrea del Sarto, the Renaissance Bishop.
He knew secrets of great and mean souls, of Pompilia and the Pope, of “Half Rome” and Caponsacchi (kah´´-pahn-sock´-kee), in “The Ring and the Book,” of “The Patriot,” and of the husband of “The Last Duchess.” He was a psychologist of penetrating intelligence, and his passion for analysis and dealing with problems sometimes ran away with him, to use a colloquialism; hence the perplexities which beset the student of some of his work and the organization of clubs to interpret him.
THE PALACE IN VENICE WHERE BROWNING DIED
It was in this house, surrounded by all the beauties of Venice, that the poet breathed his last on December 12, 1889.
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
From a portrait painted at Rome in 1859 by Field Talfourd.
Browning was often a very effective artist; but he was often very indifferent to form, and there are long productions of his which are intensely interesting but are not in any proper sense poetry. Time will separate the experiments in psychology from the achievements in art, and there will remain a body of poetry which appeals powerfully to men and women of intellectual interests and habits; a poetry notable for its reading of the secrets of individuality, its splendid optimism based on faith in the individual soul and in the purpose and power behind the universe, in the sense of freedom to take and use life daringly, in the impulse to action and spiritual venture, for its bold imagery and strong phrasing. Such poems as “Prospice,” “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” are not only impressive poetry, but have the note of the bugle in them.
MRS. BROWNING’S TOMB IN FLORENCE, ITALY
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was herself a poet of exceptional genius; she was born in 1806, married to Robert Browning in 1846, and died in 1861.
SUPPLEMENTARY READING.—“Life of Wordsworth,” Professor Knight; “Wordsworth,” F. W. H. Myers (English Men of Letters Series); “Life of Shelley,” Medwin; “Shelley,” J. Addington Symonds (English Men of Letters Series); “Life, Letters and Literary Remains of John Keats,” Richard Monckton Milnes; “The Works of Lord Byron, with His Letters and Journals and His Life,” Thomas Moore (17 volumes); “The Real Lord Byron,” J. C. Jeafferson (2 volumes); “The Life and Letters of Browning,” Mrs. Sutherland Orr; “Browning,” G. K. Chesterton (English Men of Letters Series); “Alfred, Lord Tennyson: a Memoir,” Hallam, Second Baron Tennyson; “The Life of Lord Tennyson,” G. C. Benson.
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Editorial
Some of the numbers of The Mentor have been used as the subject matter for reading clubs. That is a use of The Mentor that we most heartily welcome. We have information from one reader that the number of The Mentor on “Spain and Gibraltar” is to be used at the next meeting of a literary club in the home of the writer. This number is to be read in conjunction with a study of Washington Irving’s books on Spain—“The Alhambra” and “The Conquest of Granada.” Another club has used the article on “Dutch Masterpieces” as the core of its evening’s study, and we have it from a reader that he knows that number of The Mentor “almost by heart.” No better thing could be said of The Mentor than that it is worth knowing by heart. It means that The Mentor has become to some readers at least a fund of important information—a fund that they can literally absorb and make their own.
The New York Sun called attention editorially, a short time ago, to the yearly report of Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University, in which he deplores “too much slovenly reading matter” as an obstacle to education, “the substitution of quantity for quality,” and recalls the fact that the great lawyers of the Colonial period and the makers of the Constitution had few, but the fittest, books; knew well a few first rate books.
“One reason, aside from insufficient or incompetent instruction in the schools, for the so often complained of illiteracy, so to speak, of students, is probably to be found in the mass of stories which the Carnegie and other libraries feed to them, and which they skim through at the double quick, getting no permanent impression. Their great-grandfathers read over and over and assimilated a handful of books. The little dingy or tattered home collection was often their school, college and university.
“Let us read over again Nicolay and Hay’s description of Abraham Lincoln’s boyhood studies: ‘His reading was naturally limited by his opportunities, for books were among the rarest of luxuries in that region and time. But he read everything he could lay his hands upon, and he was certainly fortunate in the few books of which he became the possessor. It would hardly be possible to select a better handful of classics for a youth in his circumstances than the few volumes he turned with a nightly and daily hand—the Bible, “Æsop’s Fables,” “Robinson Crusoe,” “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” a history of the United States, and Weems’ “Life of Washington.” These were the best, and these he read over and over till he knew them almost by heart.’”
“Almost by heart!” Fortunate is he who has lived with a few books. In a world of volumes swollen to intolerable dimensions there are still but a few real books. They are those we make our own; that shape the mind, store the memory, are the foundation and discipline of our intellectual life.
The purpose of The Mentor is to give the gist of knowledge to be found in the world’s best books, and to give that knowledge in a form that is easy to retain. A number of Mentors thoroughly absorbed—as we might say, “learned by heart”—what a mental equipment it would mean! And the practical side, too, should be considered. Most people haven’t time to read even the world’s best books. The Mentor can be read in a few minutes.
GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON
FAMOUS ENGLISH POETS