Such, then, is a slight sketch of the characteristics of the age into which Wordsworth was born. He came in time to catch the full surges of its influence, and his spirit was one of the few destined to aid the onward tide of events, and mould their flowing forms into a fixed and plastic beauty. Not, however, by any active mingling with the affairs of men, for this was clearly no part of his vocation, but by silent watching and contemplative thought, and the faithful exercise of his poetic faculties. The political arena was open to more daring, and less costly men, who could do their temporary work and disappear without farther loss to the nation: but the poet had a greater and more enduring work to accomplish; he was to become the architect of a new literature and the singer of a new gospel of life to the world. The growing earnestness of his age demanded a voice to speak for it—many voices, indeed, each in its proper province of feeling and of thought. And in no province was this voice more loudly called for than in that of poetry, for death reigned in all the courts of the poetic temple, and every priest was a corpse which the muse had stuck about with flowers, that she might conceal even from herself the sorrowful fact of her desertion and utter misery.[A] Wordsworth came to tear away the mask, and spurn the dead from her temple.
The great object of Wordsworth’s life was to win men back, by his poetic example, to an admiration and love of the natural in all its aspects. To him nature is not only divine and glorious as a whole, but equally so in all her parts. In the meanest worm that crawls, in the tinyest flower and the rankest weed; in the summer foliage, and in the brown skeleton leaves of autumn; in the lonely mountain, and the silent stream—he recognizes the spirit of beauty, and she passes through his spirit into song, and becomes at once a poem, and a grand moral gospel. All things in heaven and earth are consecrated existences to him, no matter how profanely and lowly they may rank with common observers.
And this view of Nature he carries into the presence of man. It is not kings and the mighty ones in the dream-play of Life whom he thinks to be the only worthy subjects for poetry. If these people come in his way, he is Catholic enough to admit them through his imagination, into the immortality which awaits his books. But he does not seek them. He thinks they have already had their full share of poetic honour, and perhaps more than their due share; that so much dwelling upon such people, with their unrealities and false glares of splendour, has diseased the holy faculty of the poet, and turned his visions into morbid night-mares. It seems in short to be his opinion, that the higher we advance in the social scale, the further we are off from the sanities and truths of human life. He consequently looks for these in ruder and humbler ranks: in the dwellings of the poor, in the hearts of the peasantry, and the intuitions of uncorrupted childhood. He delights to sing of the commonest things, and is ever happy in his delineations of the hopes and fears, the loves, inquietudes, and disappointments of rustic existence. He has the minute anatomical power of Crabbe, combined with a still higher physiological and creative faculty, by which he not only lays bare the hidden meaning and laws of natural objects, but transforms the objects themselves into new beauty and significance. The grey light of morning breaking over the hill tops of his chosen retreat—the hot sunshine burning in white molten silver upon the bosom of his enchanted lakes—the lonely fisherman upon their shores—look truer and more affecting objects, as we gaze upon them, through the medium of his musical sorcery of words. His picture of the poor wandering leech gatherer, over the deep black pools of the wild moor, with the profound moral which he has attached to it, is an instance of his skill as a painter, and of his divine insight as a man of genius. “The Idiot Boy,” is another specimen of his consummate ability to render the most inert and painful nature alive and glorious by the spiritual appliances of his art. This boy, detached from the poet’s mind, is a gloomy and sorrowful spectacle; but when he enters the shattered temple in which the Idiot dwells, and unites him, by the magic of his presence, to the great universal temple of Nature, he is no longer a gloomy insanity, but a poetically created existence. We see that this Idiot also has a soul; a subject soul certainly, and bound to what we might call hard conditions of capability and action, but a soul nevertheless: vital with its own vagarious life, and rejoicing in it. Wordsworth’s revelations of the inner workings of this Idiot’s mind—of the dark moon glimmerings which break impulsively through the ruins of his intellect, and make him wild with joy or ghastly with terror—are unsurpassable achievements.
And yet Wordsworth is abused for his tameness and want of inspiration! Dead asses and idiots, Peter Bells and Waggoners, it is said, are not elevated facts enough for poetry! The foolish objectors do not understand how all poetry is based upon facts, and how the most obscure things become purified and poetic, when they are raised by imagination, and placed in new connections of thought. It is the province of the Poet to elevate the homely, and to beautify the mean. To him, indeed, nothing is mean, nothing worthless. What God has made, he, the exponent of God, shall love and honour.
It is our acknowledged want of sympathy with the common, which induced Wordsworth to devote his life and attention to the awakening of it. He knew that whatever is touched by genius is converted into gold, and stamped thenceforth as sacred, by the impress of its image. The Betty Foys of human existence, although they, too, are “encompassed by eternity,” and destined to the same futurity as the Queens Elizabeth and Mary, have never, before Wordsworth’s time, had a poetic priest high enough to make them religious by his love and fidelity to them. It required immense faith and majesty of mind to hazard the experiment; so plebeian are all Betsies that wear red cloaks and black bonnets, instead of ermines and crowns. Wordsworth, however, did not care for names and orders, but saw and worshipped humanity alone. He has dared, therefore, to say and to maintain, through a long and honourable life, that Elizabeth Foy was as much of a man as Elizabeth Queen. He has linked together the throne and the cottage through all their manifold gradations. He has, of course, had his full share of abuse for this heroic and triumphant effort; but the good old Skiddaw-granite-rock of a man was not to be moved by abuse, but continued to sing and preach in his solitude, with the solemnity and witchery of a Memnon statue.
It should be remembered, also, that Wordsworth purposely avoids the florid style in the architecture of his verse. His ideal model is the plain severity of the Saxon temple, in which the grand and the simple were united.—He aims at clear and unmistakeable utterance. His chaste simplicity is the work of an artist, and by no means the necessity of a limited intellect. If this fact were borne in mind by his detractors, it is not unlikely that they would be less furious when they speak of him. For an author should always be read, measured, and judged by his own standard, and not by ours.—Nothing can be more absurd than the subjection of a poet to any critical canon or authority. Knowing his position as an expounder of the hidden truths of the universe—as an oracle of the Infinite, and a revealer of the beauty and mystery of nature and human life—he stands in our presence like the Hebrew law-giver, covered with the golden glory and lightning of the Highest, whom he has seen upon the summits of Sinai. Henceforth we are to accept his law, not he ours.
It is useless to question and criticise in our foolish manner the new bard of God, whoever he may be, or under what circumstances soever he may appear among us. He does not live by questionings and logical inductions, but by faith and inspiration. Entranced in the miracle of his own existence, with all these vast orbs of immensity pressing upon his brain, and the silent creatures of the fair earth stealing like noiseless musical shadows into the temple of his soul, he has no time to consult the critics whether this or that mode of reproducing them is the orthodox one. He will speak in any way he can; and if the old grey-beard world will be startled or shocked at his speech, he has no other answer for it but this: “My utterance is the birth-cry of my thoughts.”
Every new poet—every genius indeed that is divine—is a notification to us that the world of things is about to be classified anew, and to assume a deeper meaning. And certainly one would think that so great an announcement might gladden the hearts of men, instead of making them savage and ferocious at it. For of all men the poet is highest and noblest. He is the awful Seer, who unveils the spirit of Nature and looks with solemn and unscathed eyes upon her naked loveliness and terror. The Beloved of God, he is admitted into the very presence of the Invisible, and reports, in such wild and strange words as he can find, the sights he has beheld there. He is the renovator of man and Nature. He lifts the human soul upon his daring wings, and carries it into light and immortality. In his words we behold the re-creation of the universe. We see Orion, like the starry skeleton of a mighty giant, go forth into the solitudes of unfathomable space; we witness the planting of the solar stars, and hear the everlasting roar of the vast sun, as it wheels, seething from God’s hands, upon its fiery axis; and these unspeakable sights are heightened in their magnificence and terrific grandeur by the poet, who holds us fast to their symbolical meaning, and chains them to the being of God, as the expressions in appearance of His thoughts and will.
By virtue, therefore, of his mission, the poet is Antinomian. He is master of all law, and no critic can trammel him. Let him try that, and the poet, like the war-horse who snuffs the far-off battle, will say to the little man—“Ha! ha!”
It is necessary that we here make a few extracts from Wordsworth’s defence, if we may call it so, of his manner of writing, in order that the reader may be prepared for a right appreciation of his poetry. In speaking of his poems as a whole, he says:—