Shelburne Essays – Wordsworth

(Pictured: William Wordsworth.) We are now leaving the writings of Irving Babbitt and delving into the brilliant essays of Paul Elmer More. I am happy to present the first post of More’s collection, Shelburne Essays, Seventh Series. P. E. More (1864-1937) was an American journalist, critic, essayist, and Christian apologist. Russell Kirk wrote, “as a critic of ideas, perhaps there has not been his peer in England or America since Coleridge.” Kirk speaks of More’s insight into the “enormous error” of secular humanists. More believed that when religion is replaced by the “mere ‘brotherhood of man,’ fratricide is not far distant.” He wrote that the one effective way of “bringing into play some measure of true justice as distinct from the ruthless law of competition . . . is through the restoration in the individual human soul of a sense of responsibility extending beyond the grave.” The alternative is a society “surrendered to the theory of ceaseless flux, with no principle of judgement except the shifting pleasure of the individual.” One may say that at present we are wading through the high tide of that flux. He and his friend Irving Babbitt became the founders of the conservative literary movement known as the New Humanism.

Shelburne Essays: Seventh Series

By Paul Elmer More

Wordsworth

There is not a great deal that is new in Mr. Knight’s Letters of the Wordsworth Family [1] and the editing can only be described as chaotic, yet we may be thankful to have the correspondence of the poet and his household brought together in any form. Perhaps the nearest approach to a discovery is the clearer figure of Coleridge seen in the communications to and about him—a dethroned deity of the upper air, not commanding the winds but tossed hither and thither by every breath of the heavens. In his petulant weaknesses and sullen indolence and decay, and still more in the disturbing daemonic quality of his personality, as he appears and disappears amid the sober circle of his friends, he is like a greater and more tragic Rossetti. As for the letters of Wordsworth himself, their character is already known. They are not precisely entertaining, but read thus together and in this companionship they impress one the more by the hard dry light of the intellect they display—a rationalism that was always present with him, ready at times to temper and even to thwart his romantic enthusiasms. When prejudice was aroused or his moral sense outraged he could indeed be amazingly perverse. It would not be easy to find a word more wantonly inappropriate for Byron than “dunce”; nor is “the damnable tendency” of such works as Don Juan likely to be diminished by branding “the despicable quality of the powers requisite for their production.” Wordsworth might have learned from that poet’s satire on himself—

Who, both, by precept and example, shows
That prose is verse, and verse is merely prose, etc.—

how much more effective it is to exaggerate the virtuous weaknesses of an enemy than to belittle his vicious strength. But these errors of judgment are not common. In general, his critical remarks turn on a dogged determination to bend language to the minute exigencies of thought and emotion, and show how from this passionate integrity of mind, rather than from any peculiar sensitiveness to beauty, he also learned “that poetry is infinitely more of an art than the world is disposed to believe.” And when, in the intercourse with a sympathetic friend, he speaks of his intimate ambition, there is something in his unflinching self-assertion and clear vision that reminds one of Milton’s dedication of himself to write such things as the world should not willingly let die. Beside that vow in The Reason of Church Government to make a poem suited “to inbreed and cherish in a great people the seeds of virtue and public utility, to allay the perturbations of the mind, and set the affections in a right time,” it is worth while to read Wordsworth’s famous letter to Lady Beaumont. One seems here to lay finger on the differences between the sublime self-consciousness of the seventeenth century and its romantic imitation of the nineteenth. The words of the modem poet are familiar to all:

“It is an awful truth, that there neither is, nor can be, any genuine enjoyment of poetry among nineteen out of twenty of those persons who 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, . . . Never forget what, I believe, was observed to you by Coleridge, that every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great or original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished; he must teach the art by which he is to be seen. . . . I doubt not that you will share with me an invincible confidence that my writings (and among them these little poems) will co-operate with the benign tendencies in human nature and society, wherever found; and that they will, in their degree, be efficacious in making men wiser, better, and happier.”

On lower ground these Letters may be considered, and so I would consider them here, as a fresh chapter in that mass of writings—the Fenwick Notes [In 1843 Wordsworth dictated notes on his work to his friend Isabella Fenwick.], [his sister] Dorothy’s Journals, De Quincey’s Reminiscences [Thomas Penson De Quincey, English writer, essayist, and literary critic; 1785-1859], first of all—that present Wordsworth’s poetical life to us in its minutest details. For the real question to-day is not so much the value of his greater works in themselves—these have their assured place—as of his chosen and cherished habit of life which is supposed to lend a prophetic power to his meanest words. I have been struck by a passage in Professor Raleigh’s monograph, which expresses aptly a thought common to most present-day admirers. “These three poems,” he says, and the reader may supply their names from a dozen in his memory, “judged by any purely literary standard, are almost devoid of merit. They could find no place in a volume of Selections chosen for beauty and glamour of expression; they would even be called silly by many a critic competent to choose such a selection. But they are poetry in the making; they lead us by the way that the poet trod, and bring us at last to the Ode [Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood; 1807] or to the Sonnet [The World Is Too Much with Us; 1807] composed on the beach near Calais, with quickened perceptions and an understanding that recognises how much of the stuff of human experience was distilled in these masterpieces.” That is but a cautious way of saying what a magazine-writer has recently stated more epigrammatically: “Those enjoy Wordsworth the most, and appreciate him the best, who see that his verse is never really prosaic.” Is it so ? Is it true that his meanest poems are noble because they are part of the utterance of a whole poetic life? Shall one dare to hint that, on the contrary, some error may be suspected in his philosophy just because it resulted in these ignoble poems?

“This will never do!” wrote Jeffrey [Francis Jeffrey, Lord Jeffrey, Scottish judge and literary critic; 1773-1850], in the opening of his review of The Excursion, and for those four words he has been the most abused and best hated writer of the age; despite Matthew Arnold’s half-hearted acceptance of the phrase, he has been held up as an example of the folly and conceit of criticism. Well, I humbly take my place on the pillory with Jeffrey, and say, It never will do. I know there are sublime passages in that “vasty version,” as did the irascible Scotsman; but I swear that in judging its total effect the Edinburgh was right, that, compared with the earlier poems, it has “less boldness of originality, and less, even, of that extreme simplicity and lowliness of tone which wavered so prettily, in the Lyrical Ballads, between silliness and pathos,” and that the manner of it exhibits imitations of Milton and Cowper, “engrafted on the natural drawl of the Lakers—and all diluted into harmony by that profuse and irrepressible wordiness which deluges all the blank verse of this school of poetry, and lubricates and weakens the whole structure of their style.” Truly, a Daniel come to judgment!

It is common to admit that Wordsworth had no humour, as, in truth, he had not; but one may agree with the Wordsworthians in disregarding that as a venial fault. Humour is a blessed boon in a world governed by a superciliously solemn Nature, in whose eyes there is no shadow of laughter when she seems most to jest with our own solemnities. But humour as a final criterion of literature is the mere cant of the day; impartially applied, it would atheticise [invalidate] half the great poems of the world. The fault of Wordsworth lies deeper than that; it is the more serious lack of native vitality. One feels this lack throughout the correspondence; it will be recognised instantly by comparing his letter of self-revelation to Lady Beaumont, magnanimous as that letter is, with Milton’s similar confession in The Reason of Church Government; it leaves his trivial letters merely trivial, just as the superabundance of vitality in Byron imparts a catching vim and interest to his most insignificant note. The failure was primarily physical, I believe. No doubt, it is due to this that none of his portraits betrays the likeness to Milton that De Quincey discovered in his face, or the light within his eyes which seemed “to come from unfathomed depths.” That he was all his life physically active is no disproof; walking for him “stood in the stead of alcohol and all other stimulants.” And one remembers that scene on the road when Dorothy was behind Wordsworth and a certain Westmoreland clergyman of “a fine, towering figure,” and Dorothy would exclaim at intervals to her companion, “Is it possible—can that be William? How very mean he looks!” Some of De Quincey’s petty gossip you will say; but, with a sidelight on larger issues. And much of the prattle in Dorothy’s own Journal points to the same conclusion. How often the pathetic entry recurs in the prolific Grasmere days: “William worked at The Ruined Cottage and made himself very ill”; “William wrote out part of his poem, and endeavoured to alter it, and so made himself ill”; “William got to work, and was worn to death.” Not physical elation, but endless fatigue went into the making of those poems; and there went into them also, vicariously, the life of a saintly woman. “I was oppressed and sick at heart for he wearied himself to death,” she writes one day, not knowing, or caring, that the weariness meant not death to him, but, as the world is made, shattered nerves and imbecility to her, and for recompense a shadowy place inter odoratum lauri nemus [among the fragrant laurel forest; Virgil, Aeneid 6.658].

[1] Letters of the Wordsworth Family, From 1787 to 1855. Collected and edited by William Knight. In three volumes. Boston: Ginn & Co., 1907.