wheeled about,
Proud and exulting like an untired horse
That cares not for his home, and, shod with steel,
Had hissed along the polished ice,
was continued, Mr. Rawnsley tells us, into manhood’s later day; and Mr. Rawnsley found many proofs that the skill the poet had gained, when
Not seldom from the uproar he retired,
Into a silent bay, or sportively
Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng
To cut across the reflex of a star,
was of such a kind as to astonish the natives among whom he dwelt. The recollection of a fall he once had, when his skate caught on a stone, still lingers in the district. A boy had been sent to sweep the snow from the White Moss Tarn for him. ‘Did Mr. Wudsworth gie ye owt?’ he was asked, when he returned from his labour. ‘Na, but I seed him tumlle, though!’ was the answer. ‘He was a ter’ble girt skater, was Wudsworth now,’ says one of Mr. Rawnsley’s informants; ‘he would put one hand i’ his breast (he wore a frill shirt i’ them days), and t’other hand i’ his waistband, same as shepherds does to keep their hands warm, and he would stand up straight and sway and swing away grandly.’
Of his poetry they did not think much, and whatever was good in it they ascribed to his wife, his sister, and Hartley Coleridge. He wrote poetry, they said, ‘because he couldn’t help it—because it was his hobby’—for sheer love, and not for money. They could not understand his doing work ‘for nowt,’ and held his occupation in somewhat light esteem because it did not bring in ‘a deal o’ brass to the pocket.’ ‘Did you ever read his poetry, or see any books about in the farmhouses?’ asked Mr. Rawnsley. The answer was curious: ‘Ay, ay, time or two. But ya’re weel aware there’s potry and potry. There’s potry wi’ a li’le bit pleasant in it, and potry sic as a man can laugh at or the childer understand, and some as takes a deal of mastery to make out what’s said, and a deal of Wudsworth’s was this sort, ye kna. You could tell fra the man’s faace his potry would niver have no laugh in it. His potry was quite different work from li’le Hartley. Hartley ’ud goa running along beside o’ the brooks and mak his, and goa in the first oppen door and write what he had got upo’ paper. But Wudsworth’s potry was real hard stuff, and bided a deal of makking, and he’d keep it in his head for long enough. Eh, but it’s queer, mon, different ways folks hes of making potry now . . . Not but what Mr. Wudsworth didn’t stand very high, and was a well-spoken man enough.’ The best criticism on Wordsworth that Mr. Rawnsley heard was this: ‘He was an open-air man, and a great critic of trees.’
There are many useful and well-written essays in Professor Knight’s volume, but Mr. Rawnsley’s is far the most interesting of all. It gives us a graphic picture of the poet as he appeared in outward semblance and manner to those about whom he wrote.
* * * * *
Mary Myles is Mrs. Edmonds’s first attempt at writing fiction. Mrs. Edmonds is well known as an authority on modern Greek literature, and her style has often a very pleasant literary flavour, though in her dialogues she has not as yet quite grasped the difference between la langue parleé and la langue écrite. Her heroine is a sort of Nausicaa from Girton, who develops into the Pallas Athena of a provincial school. She has her love-romance, like her Homeric prototype, and her Odysseus returns to her at the close of the book. It is a nice story.
* * * * *
Lady Dilke’s Art in the Modern State is a book that cannot fail to interest deeply every one who cares either for art or for history. The ‘modern State’ which gives its title to the book is that political and social organisation of our day that comes to us from the France of Richelieu and Colbert, and is the direct outcome of the ‘Grand Siècle,’ the true greatness of which century, as Lady Dilke points out, consists not in its vain wars, and formal stage and stilted eloquence, and pompous palaces, but in the formation and working out of the political and social system of which these things were the first-fruits. To the question that naturally rises on one’s lips, ‘How can one dwell on the art of the seventeenth century?—it has no charm,’ Lady Dilke answers that this art presents in its organisation, from the point of view of social polity, problems of the highest intellectual interest. Throughout all its phases—to quote her own words—‘the life of France wears, during the seventeenth century, a political aspect. The explanation of all changes in the social system, in letters, in the arts, in fashions even, has to be sought in the necessities of the political position; and the seeming caprices of taste take their rise from the same causes which went to determine the making of a treaty or the promulgation of an edict. This seems all the stranger because, in times preceding, letters and the arts, at least, appeared to flourish in conditions as far removed from the action of statecraft as if they had been a growth of fairyland. In the Middle Ages they were devoted to a virgin image of Virtue; they framed, in the shade of the sanctuary, an ideal shining with the beauty born of self-renunciation, of resignation to self-enforced conditions of moral and physical suffering. By the queenly Venus of the Renaissance they were consecrated to the joys of life, and the world saw that through their perfect use men might renew their strength, and behold virtue and beauty with clear eyes. It was, however, reserved for the rulers of France in the seventeenth century fully to realise the political function of letters and the arts in the modern State, and their immense importance in connection with the prosperity of a commercial nation.’