WORDSWORTH
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
William Wordsworth was born at Cockermouth, Cumberland, on April 7th, 1770. His father, John Wordsworth, was the agent of Sir J. Lowther, who later became the first Earl of Lonsdale. At the age of eight the boy was sent to school at Hawkshead. The impressions of his boyhood period are related in the autobiographical poem, The Prelude, (written 1805, published 1850), and from this poetical record we discern how strong the influences of Nature were to shape and develop his imagination. Wordsworth's father died in 1783, leaving the family poorly provided for. The main asset was a considerable claim upon the Earl of Lonsdale, which that individual refused to pay. On his death, in 1802, the successor to the title and estates paid the amount of the claim in full with accumulated interest. In the interval, however, the Wordsworth family remained in very straitened circumstances. Enough money was provided by Wordsworth's guardians to send him to Cambridge University In 1787. He entered St. John's College, and after an undistinguished course graduated without honors in January, 1791. His vacations were spent chiefly in Hawkshead and Wales, but one memorable vacation was marked by a walking excursion with a friend through France and Switzerland, the former country then being on the verge of revolution.
Shortly after leaving the University, in November, 1791, Wordsworth returned to France, remaining there until December of the following year. During this period he was completely won over to the principles of the revolution. The later reaction from these principles constituted the one moral struggle of his life.
In 1793 his first work appeared before the public—two poems, entitled The Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches. Coleridge, who read these pieces at Cambridge, divined that they announced the emergence of an original poetical genius above the horizon. Readers of the poems to-day, who are wise after the event, could scarcely divine as much. At about this period Wordsworth received a bequest of 900 pounds from Raisley Calvert, which enabled him and his sister Dorothy to take a small cottage at Racedown in Dorsetshire. Here he wrote a number of poems in which he worked off the ferment of his revolutionary ideas. These ideas can scarcely be said to have troubled him much in later years.
An important incident in his life, hardly second in importance to the stimulating companionship of his sister, was his meeting with Coleridge, which occurred probably towards the close of 1795. Coleridge, who was but little younger than Wordsworth, had the more richly equipped, if not the more richly endowed, mind. He was living at Nether Stowey, and in order to benefit by the stimulus which such a friendship offered, the Wordsworth's moved to Alfoxden, three miles away from Stowey (July, 1797). It was during a walking expedition to the Quantock Hills in November of that year that the poem of The Ancient Mariner was planned. It was intended that the poem should be a joint production, but Wordsworth's contribution was confined to the suggestion of a few details merely, and some scattered lines which are indicated in the notes to that poem. Their poetic theories were soon to take definite shape in the publication of the famous Lyrical Ballads (September, 1798), to which Coleridge contributed The Ancient Mariner, and Wordsworth some characteristic lyrical, reflective, and narrative poems. The excessive simplicity and alleged triviality of some of these poems long continued to give offence to the conservative lovers of poetry. Even to-day we feel that Wordsworth was sometimes the victim of his own theories.
In June of this same year (1798) Wordsworth and his sister accompanied Coleridge to Germany. They soon parted company, the Wordsworths settling at Goslar, while Coleridge, intent upon study, went in search of German metaphysics at Gottingen. Wordsworth did not come into any contract with German life or thought, but sat through the winter by a stove writing poems for a second edition of the Lyrical Ballads. April, 1799, found the brother and sister again in England. In December they settled down at Dove Cottage, Town End, Grasmere, and never, save for brief intervals, abandoned the Lake Country. In 1802, as has been said, a slight accession of fortune fell to Wordsworth by the settlement of the Lonsdale claim. The share of each of the family was 1,800 pounds. On the strength of this wind-fall the poet felt that he might marry, and accordingly brought home Mary Hutchinson as his wife.
The subsequent career of Wordsworth belongs to the history of poetry. Of events in the ordinary sense there are few to record. He successively occupies three houses in the Lake Country after abandoning Dove Cottage. We find him at Allan Bank in 1808, in the Parsonage at Grasmere in 1810, and at Rydal Mount from 1813 to his death in 1850. He makes occasional excursions to Scotland or the Continent, and at long intervals visits London, where Carlyle sees him and records his vivid impressions. For many years Wordsworth enjoys the sinecure of Distributor of Stamps for Westmoreland (400 pounds a year), and on his resignation of that office in his son's favor, he is placed on the Civil List for a well deserved pension of 300 pounds. On Southey's death, in 1843, he is appointed Poet Laureate. He died at Grasmere on April 23rd, 1850.
Wordsworth's principal long poems are: The Prelude (1805 published 1850); The Excursion (1814); The White Doe of Rylstone (1815) and Peter Bell The Waggoner (1819). His fame rests principally on his shorter narrative poems, his meditative lyrics, including his two great odes, To Duty and On the Intimations of Immortality, and on the sonnets, which rank with the finest in the language. The longer poems have many fine passages exhibiting his powers of graphic description, and illustrating his mystical philosophy of nature.
Thomas Carlyle's description of Wordsworth is of interest: "For the rest, he talked well in his way; with veracity, easy brevity, and force, as a wise tradesman would of his tools and workshop, and as no unwise one could. His voice was good, frank, and sonorous, though practically clear, distinct, and forcible, rather than melodious; the tone of him, businesslike, sedately confident; no discourtesy, yet no anxiety about being courteous. A fine wholesome rusticity, fresh as his mountain breezes, sat well on the stalwart veteran, and on all he said and did. You would have said that he was a usually taciturn man, glad to unlock himself to audience sympathetic and intelligent, when such offered itself. His face bore marks of much, not always peaceful, meditation; the look of it not bland or benevolent so much as close, impregnable, and hard; a man multa tacere loquive paratus, in a world where he had experienced no lack of contradictions as he strode along. The eyes were not very brilliant, but they had a quiet clearness; there was enough of brow, and well-shaped; rather too much cheek ('horse face' I have heard satirists say); face of squarish shape, and decidedly longish, as I think the head itself was (its length going horizontal); he was large-boned, lean, but still firm-knit, tall, and strong-looking when he stood, a right good old steel-gray figure, with rustic simplicity and dignity about him, and a vivacious strength looking through him, which might have suited one of those old steel-gray markgrafs whom Henry the Fowler set up towards the 'marches' and do battle with the intrusive heathen in a stalwart and judicious manner."
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE
Born, April 7, 1770, at Cockermouth, Cumberland.
Goes to Hawkshead Grammar School, 1778.
Sent by guardians to St. John's College, Cambridge, October, 1787.
Foreign tour with Jones, 1790.
Graduates as B.A. without honors, January, 1791.
Residence in France, November, 1791, to December, 1792.
Publication of The Evening Walk, and Descriptive Sketches, 1793.
Legacy from Raisley Calvert of 900 pounds, 1794.
Lives at Racedown, Dorsetshire, autumn of 1795 to summer of 1797.
Composes The Borderers, a tragedy, 1795-1796.
Close friendship with Coleridge begins in 1797.
Rents a house at Alfoxden, 1797.
Genesis of the Lyrical Ballads, 1797.
Lyrical Ballads published September, 1798.
German visit, September, 1798, to April, 1799.
Lives at Dove Cottage, Grasmere, December 21, 1799 to 1806, 1807-1808.
The Lonsdale debt of 8,500 pounds repaid, 1802.
Marries Mary Hutchinson, October, 1802.
Death by drowning of his brother, Captain John Wordsworth, 1805.
Lives at Coleorton, Leicestershire, 1806 to 1807.
Collected Edition of poems, 1807.
Lives at Allan Bank, Easedale, 1808 to 1810.
Lives at the Parsonage, Grasmere, 1810 to 1812.
Loss of two children and removal to Rydal Mount, Grasmere, 1813 to 1850.
Appointed distributor of stamps for Westmoreland (400 pounds a year), 1813.
The Excursion appears, July, 1814.
Honorary degree of D.C.L. from Oxford, 1839.
Resigns his office as distributor of stamps, 1842.
Receives a pension from Sir R. Peel of 300 pounds, 1842.
Appointed Poet Laureate, 1843.
Dies at Grasmere, April 23, 1850.
APPRECIATIONS
Coleridge, with rare insight, summarized Wordsworth's characteristic defects and merits as follows;
"The first characteristic, though only occasional defect, which I appear to myself to find in these poems is the inconstancy of the style. Under this name I refer to the sudden and unprepared transitions from lines or sentences of peculiar felicity (at all events striking and original) to a style, not only unimpassioned but undistinguished.
"The second defect I can generalize with tolerable accuracy, if the reader will pardon an uncouth and newly-coined word. There is, I should say, not seldom a matter-of-factness in certain poems. This may be divided into, first, a laborious minuteness and fidelity in the representation of objects, and there positions, as they appeared to the poet himself; secondly, the insertion of accidental circumstances, in order to the full explanation of his living characters, their dispositions and actions; which circumstances might be necessary to establish the probability of a statement in real life, when nothing is taken for granted by the hearer; but appear superfluous in poetry, where the reader is willing to believe for his own sake. . .
"Third; an undue predilection for the dramatic form in certain poems, from which one or other of two evils result. Either the thoughts and diction are different from that of the poet, and then there arises an incongruity of style; or they are the same and indistinguishable, where two are represented as talking, while in truth one man only speaks. . .
"The fourth class of defects is closely connected with the former; but yet are such as arise likewise from an intensity of feeling disproportionate to such knowledge and value of the objects described, as can be fairly anticipated of men in general, even of the most cultivated classes; and with which therefore few only, and those few particularly circumstanced, can be supposed to sympathize: in this class, I comprise occasional prolixity, repetition, and an eddying, instead of progression, of thought. . .
"Fifth and last; thoughts and images too great for the subject. This is an approximation to what might be called mental bombast, as distinguished from verbal: for, as in the latter there is a disproportion of the expressions to the thoughts, so in this there is a disproportion of thought to the circumstance and occasion. . .
"To these defects, which . . . are only occasional, I may oppose . . . the following (for the most part correspondent) excellencies:
"First; an austere purity of language both grammatically and logically; in short a perfect appropriateness of the words to the meaning. . .
"The second characteristic excellence of Mr. Wordsworth's works is—a correspondent weight and sanity of the thoughts and sentiments, won not from books, but from the poet's own meditative observations. They are fresh and have the dew upon them. . .
"Third; . . . the sinewy strength and originality of single lines and paragraphs; the frequent curiosa felicitas of his diction. . .
"Fourth; the perfect truth of nature in his images and descriptions as taken immediately from nature, and proving a long and genial intimacy with the very spirit which gives the physiognomic expressions to all the works of nature. Like a green field reflected in a calm and perfectly transparent lake, the image is distinguished from the reality only by its greater softness and lustre. Like the moisture or the polish on a pebble, genius neither distorts nor false-colors its objects; but on the contrary, brings out many a vein and many a tint, which escape the eye of common observation, thus raising to the rank of gems what had been often kicked away by the hurrying foot of the traveller on the dusty high-road of custom. . .
"Fifth; a meditative pathos, a union of deep and subtle thought with sensibility; a sympathy with man as man; the sympathy indeed of a contemplator, rather than a fellow-sufferer or co-mate, but of a contemplator, from whose view no difference of rank conceals the sameness of the nature; no injuries of wind or weather, of toil, or even of ignorance, wholly disguise the human face divine. The superscription and the image of the Creator still remains legible to him under the dark lines, with which guilt or calamity had cancelled or cross-barred it. Here the Man and the Poet lose and find themselves in each other, the one as glorified, the latter as substantiated. In this mild and philosophic pathos, Wordsworth appears to me without a compeer. Such as he is; so he writes.
"Last and pre-eminently, I challenge for this poet the gift of imagination in the highest and strictest sense of the word. In the play of fancy, Wordsworth, to my feelings, is not always graceful, and sometimes recondite. . . But in imaginative power, he stands nearest of all writers to Shakespeare and Milton; and yet in a kind perfectly unborrowed and his own."
These are the grounds upon which Coleridge bases the poetic claims of
Wordsworth.
Matthew Arnold, in the preface to his well-known collection of Wordsworth's poems, accords to the poet a rank no less exalted. "I firmly believe that the poetical performance of Wordsworth is, after that of Shakespeare and Milton, of which all the world now recognizes the worth, undoubtedly the most considerable in our language from the Elizabethan age to the present time." His essential greatness is to be found in his shorter pieces, despite the frequent intrusion of much that is very inferior. Still it is "by the great body of powerful and significant work which remains to him after every reduction and deduction has been made, that Wordsworth's superiority is proved."
Coleridge had not dwelt sufficiently, perhaps, upon the joyousness which results from Wordsworth's philosophy of human life and external nature. This Matthew Arnold considers to be the prime source of his greatness. "Wordsworth's poetry is great because of the extraordinary power with which Wordsworth feels the joy offered to us in the simple primary affections and duties; and because of the extraordinary power with which, in case after case, he shows us this joy, and renders it so as to make us share it." Goethe's poetry, as Wordsworth once said, is not inevitable enough, is too consciously moulded by the supreme will of the artist. "But Wordsworth's poetry," writes Arnold, "when he is at his best, is inevitable, as inevitable as Nature herself. It might seem that Nature not only gave him the matter for his poem, but wrote his poem for him." The set poetic style of The Excursion is a failure, but there is something unique and unmatchable in the simple grace of his narrative poems and lyrics. "Nature herself seems, I say, to take the pen out of his hand, and to write for him with her own bare, sheer, penetrating power. This arises from two causes: from the profound sincereness with which Wordsworth feels his subject, and also from the profoundly sincere and natural character of his subject itself. He can and will treat such a subject with nothing but the most plain, first hand, almost austere naturalness. His expression may often be called bald, as, for instance, in the poem of Resolution and Independence; but it is bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness which is full of grandeur. . . Wherever we meet with the successful balance, in Wordsworth, of profound truth of subject with profound truth of execution, he is unique."
Professor Dowden has also laid stress upon the harmonious balance of Wordsworth's nature, his different faculties seeming to interpenetrate one another, and yield mutual support. He has likewise called attention to the austere naturalism of which Arnold speaks. "Wordsworth was a great naturalist in literature, but he was also a great Idealist; and between the naturalist and the idealist in Wordsworth no opposition existed: each worked with the other, each served the other. While Scott, by allying romance with reality, saved romantic fiction from the extravagances and follies into which it had fallen, Wordsworth's special work was to open a higher way for naturalism in art by its union with ideal truth."
Criticism has long since ceased to ridicule his Betty Foy, and his Harry Gill, whose "teeth, they chatter, chatter still." Such malicious sport proved only too easy for Wordsworth's contemporaries, and still the essential value of his poetry was unimpaired.
The range of poetry is indeed inexhaustible, and even the greatest poets must suffer some subtraction from universal pre-eminence. Therefore we may frankly admit the deficiencies of Wordsworth,—that he was lacking in dramatic force and in the power of characterization; that he was singularly deficient in humor, and therefore in the saving grace of self-criticism in the capacity to see himself occasionally in a ridiculous light; that he has little of the romantic glamor and none of the narrative energy of Scott; that Shelley's lyrical flights leave him plodding along the dusty highway; and that Byron's preternatural force makes his passion seen by contrast pale and ineffectual. All this and more may freely be granted, and yet for his influence upon English thought, and especially upon the poetic thought of his country, he must be named after Shakespeare and Milton. The intellectual value of his work will endure; for leaving aside much valuable doctrine, which from didactic excess fails as poetry, he has brought into the world a new philosophy of Nature and has emphasised in a manner distinctively his own the dignity of simple manhood.—Pelham Edgar.
REFERENCES ON WORDSWORTH'S LIFE AND WORKS
Wordsworth by F. W. H. Myers, in English Men of Letters series. Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada, Limited.
Wordsworth by Walter Raleigh, London: Edward Arnold.
Wordsworth by Rosaline Masson, in The People's Books series. London: T. C. & E. C. Jack,
Wordsworthiana edited by William Knight. Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada, Limited.
Essays Chiefly on Poetry by Aubrey de Vere, 2 volumes. Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada, Limited.
Literary Essays by Richard Holt Hutton. Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada, Limited.
Studies in Literature by Edward Dowden. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd.
Aspects of Poetry by J. S. C. Shairp. Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Company.
Lives of Great English Writers from Chaucer to Browning by Walter S. Hinchman and Francis B. Gummere. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company.
Great English Poets by Julian Hill. Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs & Co.
The Greater English Poets of the Nineteenth Century by William Morton Payne. New York: Henry Holt and Company.
The Religious Spirit in the Poets by W. Boyd Carpenter, New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co,
Landscape in Poetry from Homer to Tennyson by Francis T. Palgrave. Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada, Limited.
A History of Nineteenth Century Literature by George Saintsbury. Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada, Limited.
Personal Traits of British Authors by E. T. Mason. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
The English Poets edited by T. Humphrey Ward, Vol. iv. Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada, Limited.
Selections from Wordsworth edited by Matthew Arnold in The Golden Treasury Series. Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada, Limited.
Literary Studies by Walter Bagehot, Vol. ii. London: Longmans, Green and Co.
A Study of English and American Poets by J. Scott Clark. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
Prophets of the Century edited by Arthur Rickett. London: Ward Lock and Co., Limited.
History of English Literature by A. S. Mackenzie. Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada, Limited.
A Student's History of English Literature by William Edward Simonds. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company.
Poems of William Wordsworth edited by Edward Dowden. Boston: Ginn & Company.
Home Life of Great Authors by Hattie Tyng Griswold. Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co.