"He was essentially a cold, hard, silent, practical man, who, if he had not fallen into poetry, would have done effectual work of some sort in the world. This was the impression one got of him as he looked out of his stern blue eyes superior to men and circumstances … a man of immense head and great jaws like a crocodile's, cast in a mould designed for prodigious work."
Carlyle's hatred of pleasure—an experience constitutionally impossible to himself; and his dyspeptic, neurasthenic distrust of happiness generally, corrupt all his judgments of men, and especially stultify his opinions of poets and poetry. His insane jealousy of all his contemporaries, which gave him a vision of Tennyson "sitting among his dead dogs"; in fine, his damnable Scotch-peasant's hypocrisy and agonized self-conceit as of a sinless and impotent Holy Willy, require to be cancelled ruthlessly after a scrupulous calculation, if we wish to disengage the actual features from the masterful caricature, lurid colour, violent gesture, false lights and falser shades, that mark his portraits. Having struck out Carlyle's contempt of Wordsworth as poet—poetry being an art Thomas himself had failed in; and having perceived the coldness, the hardness, the silence, and the stern look in the blue eyes, to be the necessary configuration of Wordsworth's intercourse with a personality so antagonistic to his own as Carlyle's, we have remaining a being of great power and presence, whose magnitude and influence are more convincing in Carlyle's sketch than in any other account of the man, because of the limner's absolute standard, because of his passionate veracity, and because of the deep grudge overcome. Could Wordsworth, then, have been in any effective way the rival of Napoleon? Could he even have held together a strong opposition to be the bulwark of Napoleon's power? the cradle, nursery and academe of an enduring Napoleonic dynasty? It is the debated question of genius: is genius the gift of perfect conduct that may be bestowed, as circumstances determine, in war or poetry, in art or commerce? Men of the greatest ability have thought so, or said so, Carlyle among them, and therefore it is that I pause a moment, although on the very swell of this last interrogation—made, also, as if I had never inquired it of the fates before—I felt the answer to be an everlasting no. Caesar wrote good journalistic prose, being his own war-correspondent, but his hexameters were of the same mark as Cicero's; Dante possessed all the eloquence Wordsworth lacked, and in his "De Monarchia" exhibits the very soul of sovereignty, but his diplomacy and soldiership ended in bitter bread and death by heartbreak; therefore Caesar could have indited a monumental poem, and Dante could have conquered Gaul and overthrown Pompey!
It is not probable that Wordsworth at any period in his youth would rather have been Caesar than Dante. To have the world at one's absolute commandment for power and pleasure is the desire of most virile natures, and a desire seldom renounced by the highest intelligences, however closely disgrace and misery may dog them to the end. Accordingly, when intellect, health, and strength abdicate their heritage of the world we look for some tragic circumstance compulsive. In the case of Wordsworth we look in vain. The worst that befell him was the failure of his hopes in the French Revolution. He never sent down a personal root into the busy world at all: but had from the beginning a primitive-Christian contempt for power and wealth. His reluctance—it lasted for two years—to take up the burden of poetry is to be ascribed to the shame and horror of their destiny which great poets feel. A great poet fights against his fate as high women fight against passion. There is degradation and dismay in the ministration of poetry as in "the ruddy offices of love"; but both the woman and the poet yield: for love and poetry, being of the race, are stronger than the individual.
Wordsworth's immorality, like all dynamic immorality, was what is called a return to nature. He wrote with perfect insight concerning poetry. There are many pregnant and convincing passages in his letters and prefaces: but I question if he ever found the terms characteristic of his own innovation. He said: "It may be safely affirmed that there neither is nor can be any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition." Boldly, but not safely; and the substitution of "metrical composition" for "poetry" is distinctly equivocal. The discovery Wordsworth made was this:—That poetry is the least artificial of the arts; that, compared with music, painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry is not an art at all. Given an artist, the first condition of the arts proper is the possession of mechanical means. But the poet requires none; no pencils, colours, canvas, compasses, strings, or pipes. Language, the vehicle of his no-art, is part of the poet's, as of all men's, birthright; like food and air, he has it. And when he requires to supplement the language with which the conditions of existence endue him, the founts are ready: there are no grapes to gather: that is not the winepress the poet must tread: he has only to drink from the sources of utterance. Thus poetry, like an artesian well, broaches the heart of Matter directly, and is its most intimate expression. It is almost sacrilegious to call poetry an art. Without any intermediary of violins, drums, trumpets, oils, palettes, brushes, mallets, chisels, furnaces, scaffolds, and conditioned only by language, the poet can utter that which is: the heart and the brain, the flesh, the bones and the marrow—Matter become subconscious, conscious, and self-conscious—are the orchestra and canvas of the poet's music and vision; marble and bronze, the Parthenon and Notre Dame, are misleading, unstable, and fleeting expressions of man and nature compared with poetry. The more I think of the true substance of poetry, the more impossible it is for me to see the necessity of Wordsworth's affirmation: and his own poetry, as has long been recognized, gives it the lie effectually.
As soon as he perceived the true nature of poetry, Wordsworth began to write it as if no one had ever written it before—an adventure commonly resented by the moralists of art, and in the case of Wordsworth attended by a lifetime of detraction. Why did not the literary world rise up as one man and crown the poet who wrote in 1798, in his twenty-eighth year, the lines on Tintern Abbey? Why was Wordsworth left without an audience, driven back into himself, and thwarted in all his purposes, so that we have only—in "The Prelude" and "The Excursion"—the gateway, porch, and raw material of the city he meant to build? Why, but because he was an immoralist—he, and not Byron—saying in a new manner that which had not been said before: meaning something that schools and churches, theatres and institutions, the periodical press and the literature of the day, did not mean. Wordsworth had to think and imagine the world and the universe for himself: for him the creeds were outworn; for him "the smug routine and things allowed," in which the common mind and imagination and the estates of the realm live in most ages, were a dungeon and miasma. The imagination of Wordsworth could not breathe in any Greek mythology, any Christian Heaven and Hell, or theological system of the Universe. Out of all the mythologies, pagan and Christian, he culled this one thing only—the idea of spirit: which he whittled down finally in the ninth book of "The Excursion" to an "active principle"—no longer a poetical but a metaphysical idea. Now, metaphysic is an aborted poetry. Poetry is concrete, requiring the exercise of all the material powers of body, mind, and soul, which, co-operating, are imagination. I have to use these words "mind" and "soul," because for what I wish to say there is as yet no language. I hold that men can think and imagine things for which there are no words: and that men must attend upon the expression of these things before all others: that these unsaid things are of more moment than all the literature and religion of the past: and that these things can in the first instance be said only by the poet, by one who makes words mean what he, that is, what Matter chooses. The mind, separating itself from the body and the soul, can transmute a figure of speech into a category; indeed, there is probably no figure of speech that could not be petrified into a metaphysic: metaphysics are the fossil remains of dead poetries. Also, the soul can separate itself from the body and the mind, and petrify a figure of speech into a theology: creeds are the fossil remains of dead religions. The body, the static and dynamic integer of which mind and soul are only exponents, is held in profound disesteem by both metaphysic and theology. The metaphysician says, "The Universe is thought"; the theologian says, "The Universe is soul." It is as if one were to say "amber is electricity," or "iron is sound," or "the spindrift is the sea," or "this sure and firm-set earth is a word": all possible figures of speech, and therefore all liable in the hands of a pedant to be erected into a dogma. That was the tragedy of Wordsworth; his poetry became a pedantry. It was not age—a man may be a poet at eighty; it was not disease, as Wordsworth's health lasted to the end—besides, having once known what health and strength are, a man may be a poet although glued to the floor with consumption of the spinal marrow; it was not poverty, for Wordsworth was frugal, nor ever knew the hell it is to have to write for bread—besides, a man may be a poet starving in a London suburb: it was the want of a great audience and the world's applause that left Wordsworth to the pernicious obsession of a metaphysic, dried up his poetry and made him at last little better than a moralist. But whenever imagination had its way, when his powers of body, mind, and soul were in equipollence and co-operating, Wordsworth's immorality could be as free as Shakespeare's or Burns's, and could disport itself with a naïveté, as in "The Farmer of Tilsbury Vale," impossible to Shakespeare and Burns, who were, both of them, men of the world; and no speech of Falstaff or of Hamlet, no song of the Jolly Beggars, approaches the stark utterance in "Rob Roy's Grave" of that immutable immorality which is the inmost complexion of the world.
What was it Wordsworth really wanted? He wanted what all great poets want, to extend his self-consciousness into the self-consciousness of the world. At whatever cost to himself, his actual and avowed aim was to live in the imagination of posterity to the end of time. In effect his poetry says, and his prefaces and his letters:—"What I desire—I make a present of it to all the humorists; I love them, and I wish I were a humorist: I make a present of it to all the wits; I love them also, and I would that I were witty: I make a present of it to all the fools, whom I love the most, for there I belong by reason of my naïveté and unworldliness: and, further, I make a present of it to all the impertinents and to all the malignants, whom I do not hate, for they are part of the whole—what I desire is to substitute for Christendom a William Wordsworthdom." The two potentates of English literature in the nineteenth century, Carlyle and Wordsworth, had the same ambition—to furnish imagination with a new abiding-place: the Carlyledom, which the first would have substituted for Christendom, he called Hero-worship: Wordsworthdom is a Nature-worship.
Carlyle took the world of great men for his province. His Mirabeau, Mahomet, Cromwell, Frederick, have a somewhat closer resemblance to their historical originals than Shakespeare's Hamlet bears to the Hamlet of Saxo Grammaticus, the Hamlet who accomplished an unhesitating revenge, married two wives, and died in battle: yet into his chosen heroes Carlyle projected himself as passionately as Shakespeare projected himself into Macbeth and Lear, and his Cagliostro is as sympathetically drawn as his Burns. But men reject Carlyledom. Willing enough, temporarily, to worship themselves in Mahomet or Cromwell, they find the cult of great men so pursued to end in all unhappiness; which is intolerable. Two men did try to live in Carlyledom—Ruskin and Froude: and the end of them was asphyxiation: Carlyle had exhausted the air: they had only his breath to breathe. Carlyledom is a strait-jacket for the world, and a dusty way to death and to the dull hell of the drill-sergeant and the knout. "Declined with thanks," says mankind.
Wordsworth's worship was of a higher strain than Carlyle's. He projected his own beauty of soul and his own strength of character into the world and into the universe. Tenderly he enters the delight of the daffodils: through the mountains he smites his powerful spirit. Into all beauty and into all grandeur he pours his own love and greatness, now an "eternal soul" clothed with the "unwearied joy" of the brook "dancing down its waterbreaks," now apparelled in "the Mighty Being" that
"doth with his eternal motion make A sound like thunder everlastingly."
The Solitary Reaper, singing a Gaelic song, becomes, under the spell of Wordsworth, a living presence and a power as of an incarnate melody: and the same prodigious spell inspires the gaunt and dreadful Leech-gatherer. Conceive how harsh, how crude an image, however powerful, Balzac would have given of this, one of the most appalling figures in all literature; but Wordsworth so inspires his terrible Leech-gatherer with his own antique virtue, and so invests him with his own extraordinary majesty, that it is only now as I point it out you recognize the indwelling horror of a portrait beside which the outcasts of the Russian realists lose all significance. But men reject Wordsworthdom. Two did try to live in it— John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold: but these were men of inferior temperament: and Mill also lacked imagination, while in Matthew Arnold imagination was a thing trained, as a tendon may, by special exercise, be developed into a muscle. Further, neither Mill nor Arnold had any childhood: they were never boys. Nowhere in Wordsworthdom is there any actual room for that which, failing a known surname, we still call by the "fond, adoptious Christendom" of Romance: there is little scope in Wordsworthdom for Napoleon or Wagner, for a great tragedy or a great triumph: nor is the universe the projection of a Wordsworthian humanity into space. Generation after generation may visit Carlyledom and Wordsworthdom, and there may always be a few vengeful or placid minds to make, or to try to make, a permanent abode in the frowning donjon of the one, or the pastoral peace of the other: but neither is an enduring habitation for the spirit of an era.