Oxford Lectures on Poetry

by A. C. Bradley

As for war, Wordsworth neither strongly felt, nor at all approved, that elementary love of fighting which, together with much nobler things, is gratified by some great poetry. And assuredly he could not, even if he would, have rivalled the last canto of Marmion, nor even the best passages in the Siege of Corinth. But he is not to be judged by his intentional failures. The martial parts of the White Doe of Rylstone are, with few exceptions, uninteresting, if not painfully tame. The former at least they were meant to be. The Lay of the Last Minstrel was on every tongue. The modest poet was as stiff-necked a person as ever walked the earth; and he was determined that no reader of his poem who missed its spiritual interest should be interested in anything else. Probably he overshot his mark. For readers who could understand him the effect he aimed at would not have been weakened by contrast with an outward action narrated with more spirit and sympathy. But, however that may be, he did what he meant to do. In the Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle, again, the war-like close of the Song was not written for its own sake. It was designed with a view to the transition to the longer metre, the thought of peace in communion with nature, and the wonderful stanza ‘Love had he found in huts where poor men lie.’ But, for the effect of this transition, it was necessary for Wordsworth to put his heart into the martial close of the Song; and surely it has plenty of animation and glory. Its author need not have shrunk from the subject of war if he had wished to handle it con amore.

The poet whose portrait we drew when we began might have been the author of the White Doe, and perhaps of Brougham Castle, and possibly of the Happy Warrior. He could no more have composed the Poems dedicated to National Independence and Liberty than the political sonnets of Milton. And yet Wordsworth wrote nothing more characteristic than these Poems, which I am not going to praise, since Mr. Swinburne’s praise of them is, to my mind, not less just than eloquent. They are characteristic in many ways. The later are, on the whole, decidedly inferior to the earlier. Even in this little series, which occupies the first fifteen years of the century, the decline of Wordsworth’s poetic power and the increasing use of theological ideas are clearly visible. The Odes, again, are much inferior to the majority of the Sonnets. And this too is characteristic. The entire success of the Ode to Duty is exceptional, and it is connected with the fact that the poem is written in regular stanzas of a simple metrical scheme. The irregular Odes are never thus successful. Wordsworth could not command the tone of sustained rapture, and where his metrical form is irregular his ear is uncertain. The Immortality Ode, like King Lear, is its author’s greatest product, but not his best piece of work. The Odes among the Poems which we are now considering are declamatory, even violent, and yet they stir comparatively little emotion, and they do not sing. The sense of massive passion, concentrated, and repressing the utterance it permits itself, is that which most moves us in his political verse. And the Sonnet suited this.

The patriotism of these Poems is equally characteristic. It illustrates Wordsworth’s total rejection of the Godwinian ideas in which he had once in vain sought refuge, and his belief in the necessity and sanctity of forms of association arising from natural kinship. It is composed, we may say, of two elements. The first is the simple love of country raised to a high pitch, the love of ‘a lover or a child’; the love that makes it for some men a miserable doom to be forced to live in a foreign land, and that makes them feel their country’s virtues and faults, and joys and sorrows, like those of the persons dearest to them. We talk as if this love were common. It is very far from common; but Wordsworth felt it.[9] The other element in his patriotism I must call by the dreaded name of ‘moral,’ a name which Wordsworth did not dread, because it meant for him nothing stereotyped or narrow. His country is to him the representative of freedom, left, as he writes in 1803,

the only light Of Liberty that yet remains on earth.

This Liberty is, first, national independence; and that requires military power, the maintenance of which is a primary moral duty.[10] But neither military power nor even national independence is of value in itself; and neither could be long maintained without that which gives value to both. This is the freedom of the soul, plain living and high thinking, indifference to the externals of mere rank or wealth or power, domestic affections not crippled (as they may be) by poverty. Wordsworth fears for his country only when he doubts whether this inward freedom is not failing;[11] but he seldom fears for long. England, in the war against Napoleon, is to him almost what the England of the Long Parliament and the Commonwealth was to Milton,—an elect people, the chosen agent of God’s purpose on the earth. His ideal of life, unlike Milton’s in the stress he lays on the domestic affections and the influence of nature, is otherwise of the same Stoical cast. His country is to him, as to Milton,

An old and haughty nation, proud in arms.[12]

And his own pride in it is, like Milton’s, in the highest degree haughty. It would be calumnious to say that it recalls the description of the English given by the Irishman Goldsmith,

Pride in their port, defiance in their eye, I see the lords of human kind pass by;

for Wordsworth had not the faintest wish to see his countrymen the lords of human kind, nor is there anything vulgar in his patriotism; but there is pride in his port and defiance in his eye. And, lastly, the character of his ideal and of this national pride, with him as with Milton, is connected with personal traits,—impatience of constraint, severity, a certain austere passion, an inclination of imagination to the sublime.