“An unsubstantial faery place.”
That passed with youth, and could not return; but another sedater, more moralizing, yet sweetly gracious mood came on,—a mood which is in keeping with that earlier, its natural product representative in one, whose days and whose moods were as he himself wished them to be, “linked each to each by natural piety.” As there is in character a grace that becomes every age, so there is a poetry. And Wordsworth’s later expressions about Nature and life are, I venture to think, as becoming in an old man, matured by much experience and by sorrow, as his earlier more ideal poems became a young man just restored from a great mental crisis, but still with youth on his side. If the poems of the maturer age lost something that belonged to the earlier ones, they also gained new elements,—they contain words which are a support amid the stress of life, and a benediction for its decline.
There were many who knew Wordsworth’s poetry well while he was still alive, who felt its power, and the new light which it threw on the material world. But though they half-guessed they did not fully know the secret of it. They got glimpses of part, but could not grasp the whole of the philosophy on which it was based But when, after his death, “The Prelude” was published, they were let into the secret, they saw the hidden foundations on which it rests, as they had never seen them before. The smaller poems were more beautiful, more delightful, but “The Prelude” revealed the secret of their beauty. It showed that all Wordsworth’s impassioned feeling towards Nature was no mere fantastic dream, but based on sanity, on a most assured and reasonable philosophy. It was as though one who had been long gazing on some building grand and fair, admiring the vast sweep of its walls, and the strength of its battlements, without understanding their principle of coherence, were at length to be admitted inside by the master builder, and given a view of the whole plan from within, the principles of the architecture, and the hidden substructures on which it was built. This is what “The Prelude” does for the rest of Wordsworth’s poetry.
For all his later phases of thought, all that followed the republicanism of “The Prelude,” Wordsworth, I know, has been well abused. Shelley bemoaned him, Mr. Browning has flouted him, and following these all the smaller fry of Liberalism have snarled at his heels. But all his changes of thought are self-consistent, and if fairly judged, the good faith and wisdom of them all can well be justified. For a few years during the Revolution he had hoped for a sudden regeneration from that great catastrophe. He found himself deceived, and gradually unlearnt the fallacies whence that deception had sprung. He ceased to look for the improvement of mankind from violent convulsions. Neither did he expect much from gradual political change, nor from those formalities which we nickname education, not from a revised code and payment by results, not from these nor from any outward machinery. But he hoped much from whatever helps forward the growth, the expanding, and the deepening, in all the grades of men, of the “feeling soul,” by which they may become more sensitive to the face of Nature, more sensitive towards their fellow-men and the lower creatures, and more open to influences which are directly divine. In these things he believed, for these he wrought consistently, till his task was done.
I have dwelt thus fully on the growth of Wordsworth’s character, the moral discipline through which he passed, and the ultimate maturity of soul to which he attained, in order that we may understand his doctrine regarding Nature. He held that it was only through the soul that the outer world is rightly apprehended—only when it is contemplated through the human emotions of admiration, awe, and love. This he held all his life through. But yet in his way of dealing with Nature, taken as a whole, we shall not be wrong if we note two different, though not conflicting, phases. In his earlier poetic period he was mainly absorbed in the unity and large livingness of Nature—in feeling and interpreting the life that is in each individual thing, as well as in the whole, in substituting for a mere machine,—a universe of death,—one which
“Moves with light, and light informed,
Actual, divine, and true.”
In doing this it is not too much to say that his poetry is the most powerful protest which English literature contains against the views of the world engendered by a mechanical deism—the best witness to the spiritual element that exists both in Nature and in man. Nor less is it our surest antidote to the exclusively analytic and microscopic view of Nature, so tyrannous over present thought, the end of which is universal disintegration. This was the work he did when he worked more in his earlier, what has been called, his naturalistic vein.
In his later period the moral tendency became predominant, not that it had ever been absent from his thought. Even at a comparatively early time he had been wont to take the sights and sounds of the sensible world as symbols and correspondences of the invisible. In 1806, hearing the cuckoo’s voice echo from Nab-scar, as he walked on the opposite side of Rydal Mere, he exclaimed:—
“Have not we too? yes, we have