Lectures on English poets

by James Russell Lowell

Too bright and good

For human nature’s daily food.

I fancy from what I have heard from those who knew him that he had a tremendous prose-power, and that, with his singing-robes off, he was dry and stiff as a figure-head. He had a purity of mind approaching almost to prudery, and a pupil of Dr. Arnold told me he had heard him say once at dinner that he thought the first line of Keats’s ode to a “Grecian Urn” indecorous. The boys considered him rather slow. There was something rocky and unyielding in his mind; something that, if we found it in a man we did not feel grateful to and respect, we should call hard. Even his fancy sometimes is glittering and stiff, like crystallizations in granite. But at other times how tender and delicate and dewy from very contrast, like harebells growing in a crag-cleft!

There seem to have been two distinct natures in him—Wordsworth the poet, and Wordsworth the man who used to talk about Wordsworth the poet. One played a kind of Baruch to the other’s Jeremiah, and thought a great deal of his master the prophet. Baruch was terrifically uninspired, and was in the habit of repeating Jeremiah’s poems at rather more length than was desired, selecting commonly the parts which pleased him, Baruch, the best. Baruch Wordsworth used to praise Jeremiah Wordsworth, and used to tell entertaining anecdotes of him,—how he one day saw an old woman and the next did not, and so came home and dictated some verses on this remarkable phenomenon; and how another day he saw a cow.

But in reading Wordsworth we must skip all the Baruch interpolations, and cleave wholly to Jeremiah, who is truly inspired and noble—more so than any modern. We are too near him, perhaps, to be able wholly to separate the personal from the poetical. I acknowledge that I reverence the noble old man both for his grand life and his poems, that are worthy expressions of it. But a lecturer is under bonds to speak what he believes to be the truth. While I think that Wordsworth’s poetry is a thing by itself, both in its heights and depths, something sacred and apart, I cannot but acknowledge that his prosing is sometimes a gift as peculiar to himself. Like old Ben Jonson, he apparently wished that a great deal of what he wrote should be called “works.” Especially is this true of his larger poems, like the “Excursion” and the “Prelude.” However small, however commonplace the thought, the ponderous machine of his verse runs on like a railway train that must start at a certain hour though the only passenger be the boy that cries lozenges. He seems to have thought that inspiration was something that could be turned on like steam. Walter Savage Landor told me that he once said to Wordsworth: “Mr. Wordsworth, a man may mix as much poetry with prose as he likes, and it will make it the better; but the moment he mixes a bit of prose with his poetry, it precipitates the whole.” Wordsworth, he added, never forgave him.

There was a great deal in Wordsworth’s character that reminds us of Milton; the same self-reliance, the same purity and loftiness of purpose, and, I suspect, the same personal dryness of temperament and seclusion of self. He seems to have had a profounder imagination than Milton, but infinitely less music, less poetical faculty. I am not entirely satisfied of the truth of the modern philosophy which, if a man knocks another on the head, transfers all the guilt to some peccant bump on his own occiput or sinciput; but if we measure Wordsworth in this way, I feel as if he had plenty of forehead, but that he wanted hind-head, and would have been more entirely satisfactory if he had had one of the philo-something-or-other.

It cannot be denied that in Wordsworth the very highest powers of the poetical mind were associated with a certain tendency to the diffuse and commonplace. It is in the Understanding (always prosaic) that the great golden veins of his imagination are embedded. He wrote too much to write always well; for it is not a great Xerxes army of words, but a compact Greek ten thousand that march safely down to posterity. He sets tasks to the divine faculty, which is much the same as trying to make Jove’s eagle do the service of a clucking hen. Throughout the “Prelude” and the “Excursion,” he seems striving to bind the wizard imagination with the sand-ropes of dry disquisition, and to have forgotten the potent spell-word which would make the particulars adhere. There is an arenaceous quality in the style which makes progress wearisome; yet with what splendors of mountain-sunsets are we not rewarded! What golden rounds of verse do we not see stretching heavenward, with angels ascending and descending! What haunting melodies hover around us, deep and eternal, like the undying barytone of the sea! And if we are compelled to fare through sands and desert wilderness, how often do we not hear airy shapes that syllable our names with a startling personal appeal to our highest consciousness and our noblest aspiration, such as we might wait for in vain in any other poet.

Take from Wordsworth all which an honest criticism cannot but allow, and what is left will show how truly great he was. He had no humor, no dramatic power, and his temperament was of that dry and juiceless quality that in all his published correspondence you shall not find a letter, but only essays. If we consider carefully where he was most successful, we shall find that it was not so much in description of natural scenery, or delineation of character, as in vivid expression of the effect produced by external objects and events upon his own mind. His finest passages are always monologues. He had a fondness for particulars, and there are parts of his poems which remind us of local histories in the undue importance given to trivial matter. He was the historian of Wordsworthshire. This power of particularization (for it is as truly a power as generalization) is what gives such vigor and greatness to single lines and sentiments of Wordsworth, and to poems developing a single thought or word. It was this that made him so fond of the sonnet. His mind had not that reach and elemental movement of Milton’s which, like the trade-winds, gathered to itself thoughts and images like stately fleets from every quarter; some, deep with silks and spicery, come brooding over the silent thunders of their battailous armaments, but all swept forward in their destined track, over the long billows of his verse, every inch of canvas strained by the unifying breath of their common epic impulse. It was an organ that Milton mastered, mighty in compass, capable equally of the trumpet’s ardors, or the slim delicacy of the flute; and sometimes it bursts forth in great crashes through his prose, as if he touched it for solace in the intervals of his toil. If Wordsworth sometimes puts the trumpet to his lips, yet he lays it aside soon and willingly for his appropriate instrument, the pastoral reed. And it is not one that grew by any vulgar stream, but that which Apollo breathed through tending the flocks of Admetus, that which Pan endowed with every melody of the visible universe, the same in which the soul of the despairing nymph took refuge and gifted with her dual nature, so that ever and anon, amid notes of human joy and sorrow, there comes suddenly a deeper and almost awful tone, thrilling us into dim consciousness of a forgotten divinity.

Of no other poet, except Shakspeare, have so many phrases become household words as of Wordsworth. If Pope has made current more epigrams of worldly wisdom, to Wordsworth belongs the nobler praise of having defined for us, and given us for a daily possession, those faint and vague suggestions of other-worldliness of whose gentler ministry with our baser nature the hurry and bustle of life scarcely ever allowed us to be conscious. He has won for himself a secure immortality by a depth of intuition which makes only the best minds at their best hours worthy, or indeed capable, of his companionship, and by a homely sincerity of human sympathy which reaches the humblest heart. Our language owes him gratitude for the purity and abstinence of his style, and we who speak it, for having emboldened us to trust ourselves to take delight in simple things, and to trust ourselves to our own instincts. And he hath his reward. It needs not to

Bid Beaumont lie