At last, in 1814, the great poem was published upon which Wordsworth’s fame is built, viz., “The Excursion.” It was met, as usual, with tremendous and most indiscriminate abuse, especially by Jeffrey, in his “This won’t do” article. But despite all this, the poem grew deeply into the public mind, and is still growing there; and ranks, at last, with our highest poetry. All the characters and scenes in it are drawn from life, and there are few more interesting papers than the memoranda which the poet has left respecting these characters and their localities. “The Wanderer,” he acknowledges, is chiefly an embodied idea of what he fancied his own character might have become in the said Wanderer’s circumstances. His sister, with her gentle love and sweet remonstrances,—although ready to follow him to the ends of the earth—did in reality save him from this wild nomadic life, by fixing his thoughts upon a home, and the genial influences which domestic life would produce and exercise upon his poetic genius. And then his wife, children, and the rich harvests of fortune, which were reaped without any sowing of his, and dropped into his lap, finished the work his sister had begun, and finally settled him as a citizen and a family man. Otherwise, being strong in body, I should, he says, very probably, have “taken to the way of life such as that in which my ‘Wanderer’ passed the greater part of his days.” Much, however, of what the “Wanderer” says and does, was the result, in verse, of the poet’s experience; was what he had actually heard and seen, although refined, of course, as it passed through his imagination. He was fond of talking to all kinds of strange characters;—now treading on the outskirts of social life, or wandering with a wild, vagabond independence amongst the highways of towns and cities. Whatever of romance and adventure they had known, he wormed out of them, or charmed out of them; and he partially instances, as an illustration of this prying curiosity—this insatiable longing after experience, and the history of men—an old Scotchman, who married finally a relation of his wife’s, and settled down at Kendal, and a travelling packman, from whom he learned much, and whose adventures and wisdom are embodied in the character of the “Wanderer.” “The Solitary,” “The Pastor,” “Pedlar,” “Margaret,” “Miser,” and all the dramatis personæ of the poem, are made up of veritable human materials, and had their architypes in the great world of humanity. The reader, however, must go to Dr. Wordsworth for a full relation respecting these matters. All I can add here, respecting the “Excursion,” is that only 500 copies were disposed of in six years; and when, in 1827, another edition, of the same number of copies, was printed, it took seven years more to exhaust it. The poet, however, was not daunted by this culpable neglect of his immortal lines; but conscious of his own greatness, he wrote, in a letter to Southey,—“Let the age continue to love its own darkness; I shall continue to write, with, I trust, the light of heaven upon me.” Jeffrey, in the pride and arrogance of his position, as Executioner General of the Courts of Critical Assize, boasted that HE—poor devil!—had crushed the “Excursion;” and the boast was repeated to Southey:—“Tell him,” said he, Southey “that he could as soon crush Skiddaw!” Bernard Barton,—a writer whose chief merit consists in a letter written to Wordsworth, expressive of his homage and reverence for the Bard of Rydal—alludes, in the said letter, to Jeffrey: “He has taken,” says Wordsworth, in reply, “a perpetual retainer, from his own incapacity, to plead against my claims to public approbation.” So, we see, that the good poet could hit hard if he liked; although he rarely descended to this literary pugilism, thinking it beneath the dignity of his art and character.
It was Wordsworth’s custom to compose in the open air; and as his servant once said to a visitor, “This, sir, is my master’s library—his study is out of doors.” He had a great and sickening dread of writing; and his sister, or some other member of his family was always at hand to perform for him the office of amanuensis. In the year 1807, when on a visit to his wife’s brother at Stockton-on-Tees, the weather being very boisterous, and the winds rough, he used to pace up and down under the lee of a row of corn-stacks in a field near that town—and it was here that he composed the earlier part of “White Doe of Ryletone,” chaunting his verses aloud to the astonished stacks. The poem was not published until 1815, and has been much misinterpreted, and consequently abused. The truth is, that Wordsworth wrote always upon principle, and a carefully premeditated plan; there was always a high purpose in his poems, both moral and intellectual. His poetical canons were likewise his own, and his mode of treating a subject was always in conformity with them, or illustrations of them. Superficial readers, who had been accustomed to the objective poetry of Scott, could not understand Wordsworth, therefore; for he was studiously subjective, and the interest of his poems hangs nearly always upon the development of mere spiritual forces, and their progress, if I may so speak, outwards, in the subjugation of the external world or in the strengthening of the soul to bear the ills and mishaps of life with a sublime fortitude. “The White Doe” is a memorable example of this spiritual aim. “Every thing,” says Wordsworth, ‘attempted by the principal personages in this poem fails, so far as its object is external and substantial; so far as it is moral and spiritual it succeeds. The heroine of the poem knows that her duty is not to interfere with the current of events, either to forward or delay them; but
“To abide
The shock, and finally secure
O’er pain and grief a triumph pure.”
This she does in obedience to her brother’s injunction, as most suitable to a mind and character that, under previous trials, had been proved to accord with his. She achieves this, not without aid from the communication with the inferior creature which often leads her thoughts to revolve upon the past with a tender and humanising influence that exalts rather than depresses her. Her anticipated beatification of the mind, and the apotheosis of the companion of her solitude, are the points at which the poem aims, and constitutes its legitimate catastrophe.” All this is widely different from the usual mode of conducting dramatic action, and yet the action of the poem in question is complete and satisfactory, and is artistically developed from its own spiritual germ, or starting point.
Whilst walking, and composing “The White Doe,” Wordsworth received a wound in his foot; and it is curious to remark that, even when he ceased walking, the act of composition increased the irritation of the wound, whilst a mental holiday produced a rapid cure. “Poetic excitement,” he says, “when accompanied by protracted labour in composition, has throughout my life brought on more or less of bodily derangement. Nevertheless I am, at the close of my seventy-third year, in what may be called excellent health. But I ought to add, that my intellectual labour has generally been carried on out of doors.”
The next group of poems—and two of them certainly amongst the grandest triumphs of poetic art, were composed respectively as follows:—“Laodamia,” in 1814; “Dion,” in 1816; and the “Ode to Lycoris,” in 1817. The first and second of these poems were entirely Greek in their character and form, and Keates’ “Hyperion” is the only modern poem (and this a fragment) which is worthy to be placed in comparison with them. It is singular how the idea of these poems originated in the mind of the poet. He had been preparing his son for the University, and had to read up his old classics for this purpose. Hence the Classic Spirit took up its abode with him, and urged him to these beautiful and plastic productions. About this time, and with the same object in view—viz., the education of his son—he translated one of the earlier books of the “Æneid” into rhyme. Coleridge, in writing to the author respecting this translation, says, he has attempted an impossibility, and regrets he should have wasted his time on a work (viz., of translation) so much below him. Wordsworth was always attached to the classics; and before he read Virgil, he was so fond of Ovid, that he invariably got into a passion when he found this author placed below Virgil. He was never weary of travelling over the scenes through which Homer led him. “Classical literature,” he says, “affected me by its own beauty.”
“Peter Bell” appeared in 1819. It was composed twenty years before, as already related; and sold better than any of Wordsworth’s previous poems, notwithstanding the abuse of the critics. Five hundred copies were exhausted before one month, between April and May of this one year (1819). “The Waggoner” was published at the same time, but was not so successful, perhaps on account of its mere local interest. The “Sonnets on the River Duddon” appeared about the same time, and were dedicated to the Rev. Dr. Wordsworth, the poet’s brother, who was at that time Rector of Lambeth. “The river Duddon has its main source[J] in the mountain range near the “Three Shire Stones,” as they were called, where the three counties, Westmoreland, Cumberland, and Lancashire meet. It flows to the south through Seathwaite, by Broughton, to the Duddon Sands, and into the Irish Sea.”—Wordsworth’s first acquaintance with this stream commenced in his boyhood, during the time that he was so passionately fond of angling: upon one of his fishing excursions he joined an old weather-beaten man, and went far away from home, seduced by the dear delight of his art. On their return, the embryo poet was so wearied, that the old man had to carry him on his back. He says that his earliest recollections of this stream were full of distress and disappointment; but in later times he visited it with so many beloved persons, that its waters flowed through him in streams of music—in anthems of affectionate song.
In 1820 Wordsworth made another tour to the Continent, in company with his wife and sister, Mr. and Mrs. Monkhonse, then just married, and Miss Herricks. They left these two ladies at Berne, while Mr. Monkhouse went with the poet and his retinue, on an excursion amongst the Alps, as far as Milan. They were joined at Lucerne by Mr. H. C. Robinson; and the two ladies, whom they had left at Berne, rejoined them at Geneva, when the whole party went to Paris, where they remained five weeks.
In 1822 Wordsworth published a volume of Sonnets, and other Poems, as the result of this tour, entitled, “Memorials of a Tour on the Continent.”
In two letters to Lord Lonsdale—one dated from Lucerne, August 19th, 1820, and the other from Paris, dated October 7, 1820,—the poet has given a general outline of this tour and its incidents.[K] I ought to add that Wordsworth visited Waterloo, amongst other places of interest, at this time. The party returned by way of Boulogne, November 2nd, and had a narrow escape of shipwreck,—the vessel striking upon a sand-bank, and being then driven with violence on a rocky road in the harbour, where she was battered about until the ebbing of the tide set her at liberty—at least from the violence of the sea; “and, blessed be God,” says Wordsworth, in his Journal, “for our preservation!”