It was of such simple and unchartered blessings that he loved to sing. He did not think that the vain or the worldly would care to listen to his voice. Indeed he said in a memorable passage of gentle scorn that he did not expect his poetry to be fashionable. “It is an awful truth,” wrote he to Lady Beaumont, “that there neither is nor can be any genuine enjoyment of poetry among nineteen out of twenty of those persons who either live or wish to live in the broad light of the world,—among those who either are, or are striving to make themselves, people of consideration in society. This is a truth, and an awful one, because to be incapable of a feeling of poetry, in my sense of the word, is to be without love of human nature and reverence for God.” He did not expect that his poetry would be popular in that world where men and women devote themselves to the business of pleasure, and where they care only for the things that minister to vanity or selfishness,—and it never was.
But there was another world where he expected to be welcome and of service. He wished his poetry to cheer the solitary, to uplift the downcast, to bid the despairing hope again, to teach the impoverished how much treasure was left to them. In short, he intended by the quiet ministry of his art to be one of those
“Poets who keep the world in heart,”
—and so he was.
It is impossible to exaggerate the value of such a service. Measured by any true and vital standard Wordsworth’s contribution to the welfare of mankind was greater, more enduring than that of the amazing Corsican, Bonaparte, who was born but a few months before him and blazed his way to glory. Wordsworth’s service was to life at its fountain-head. His remedy for the despair and paralysis of the soul was not the prescription of a definite philosophy as an antidote. It was a hygienic method, a simple, healthful, loving life in fellowship with man and nature, by which the native tranquillity and vigour of the soul would be restored. The tendency of his poetry is to enhance our interest in humanity, to promote the cultivation of the small but useful virtues, to brighten our joy in common things, and to deepen our trust in a wise, kind, over-ruling God. Wordsworth gives us not so much a new scheme of life as a new sense of its interior and inalienable wealth. His calm, noble, lofty poetry is needed to-day to counteract the belittling and distracting influence of great cities; to save us from that most modern form of insanity, publicomania, which sacrifices all the sanctities of life to the craze for advertising; and to make a little quiet space in the heart, where those who are still capable of thought, in this age of clattering machinery, shall be able to hear themselves think.
V
But there is one still deeper element in Wordsworth’s poetry. He tells us very clearly that the true liberty and grandeur of mankind are to be found along the line of obedience to law and fidelity to duty. This is the truth which was revealed to him, slowly and serenely, as a consolation for the loss of his brief revolutionary dream. He learned to rejoice in it more and more deeply, and to proclaim it more and more clearly, as his manhood settled into firmness and strength.
Fixing his attention at first upon the humblest examples of the power of the human heart to resist unfriendly circumstances, as in Resolution and Independence, and to endure sufferings and trials, as in Margaret and Michael, he grew into a new conception of the right nobility. He saw that it was not necessary to make a great overturning of society before the individual man could begin to fulfil his destiny. “What then remains?” he cries—
“To seek
Those helps for his occasion ever near