Shelburne Essays: William Wordsworth (Part 2)

(Pictured: Lord Byron.) Having left the writings of Irving Babbitt, we are delving into the essays of Paul Elmer More. I am happy to present now the second 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 (Part 2)

One suspects that this same low vitality had something to do with Wordsworth’s political attitude. He has been denounced, and variously excused, for his desertion of the French Revolution, but I do not know that any one has attributed the change in large measure to a merely temperamental revulsion from the spectacle of ideas converted into incalculable activities. He himself has told of his early enthusiasm at the time when Europe

. . . was thrilled with joy,
France standing on the top of golden hours,
And human nature seeming to be born.

Nor does it appear, in reality, that his political ideas altered essentially with his later conservatism; always he was full of pity for the “sorrowful reverse of all mankind”; even amidst his agitation over the English Reform bill he declared that he was not an anti-reformer, and at the end of his life he could still say, “I am a democrat.” At the same time, with all his humanitarian sympathies and his love of liberty there had been from the beginning an element of stability and moral reverence in his nature, which one likes to uphold as a salutary offset to the fretful impatience of Shelley’s revolutionary romanticism. But it was not principle so much as the aversion to limitless action that turned him against France when the Revolution began to work itself out in fact. Then it was, rather than when idling in “academic bowers” that a feeling of blind disease entered into his soul:

I trembled,—thought, at times, of human life
With an indefinite terror and dismay,
Such as the storms and angry elements
Had bred in me; but gloomier far, a dim
Analogy to uproar and misrule,
Disquiet, danger, and obscurity.

It is not without bearing on this trait of his character that Napoleon, the man of ruthless activity, was to Wordsworth merely a “remorseless desperado,” whose very name caused a shiver, whereas to Hazlitt, another romantic revolutionary but different in his nervous vitality, he was to the end a divine agent.

And Wordsworth’s art was affected in the same way by his temperament. In the poetry of events he was dismally weak. He himself, long years after the composition of The Borderers, could speak with complacency of his “turn for dramatic writing,” but any one who has read to the end of that youthful indiscretion knows that it is one of the falsest and most desperately mawkish plays in the language. In the same way the stories that make up the section of The Excursion called too appropriately The Church-Yard, need only be compared with Crabbe’s Tales, whose plots in several instances they almost duplicate, to see how impossible it was for Wordsworth to pass from reflective sentiment to character as an agent. Love he commonly avoided as a theme because he thought himself by nature too passionate! It was rather the dynamic force of love, the power of love as the supreme mover and perturbator of men, that frightened him from the theme. In the beauty of a woman’s face Marlowe saw the energy that launched a thousand ships; militat omnis amans [Every lover is a soldier], said Ovid, and from that inner and external battle Wordsworth turned by a native instinct. He has, indeed, left a little group of love poems almost perfect in their restrained beauty; but it is the shaping influence of nature he admires in the grace of that undiscovered “Lucy,” and in her death he is awestruck by the sense of passionate absorption, if the phrase is allowed, into the passionless life of the world:

A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.

This is not the love that commonly stirs the determination or the despair of a bachelor of twenty-nine; it is neither the Pandemian [involving sexual pleasure, the love of family, and the love that unites the inhabitants of a nation] nor the Uranian [representing the celestial, or spiritual aspects of love] Venus of the poets, neither the god Eros, with his flaming sword, nor the boy with his flower-tipped arrows. It is rather another step toward that communion with nature, that business of contemplative revery, into which the terror of events was driving him. Such a musing withdrawal of the soul cannot, of course, be separated from the general romantic movement of the age, but its special form was determined in Wordsworth by his individual temperament, and its value as a priestly lesson must be measured in some degree by our understanding of his unconscious motives. Now there is a passage in one of his letters (No. cccxviii of Mr. Knight’s collection) which suggests a way of throwing these motives into a high light by comparison. He is rebuking his friend Gillies for quoting Lord Byron’s “famous passage on solitude” (Childe Harold, canto ii, stanzas 26 and 27): this, he thinks, “does not deserve the notice which has been bestowed on it” and as composition “is bad, particularly the line:

Minions of grandeur [splendour] shrinking from distress”;—

and he goes on to clinch the criticism:

“To illustrate my meaning, and for no other purpose, I refer to my own lines on the Wye, where you will find the same sentiment, not formally put as it is here, but ejaculated, as it were, fortuitously in the musical succession of preconceived feeling.”

Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey is in the memory of every lover of poetry to-day, but Byron’s stanzas must, I fear, be quoted at length or the point of the comparison will be lost:

But ’midst the crowd, the hum, the shock of men,
To hear, to see, to feel, and to possess,
And roam along, the world’s tired denizen,
With none who bless us, none whom we can bless,—
Minions of splendour shrinking from distress!—
None that, with kindred consciousness endued,
If we were not would seem to smile the less,
Of all that flatter’d, follow’d, sought, and sued;
This is to be alone; this, this is solitude!

More blest the life of godly eremite.
Such as on lonely Athos may be seen,
Watching at eve upon the giant height,
Which looks o’er waves so blue, skies so serene.
That he who there at such an hour hath been
Will wistful linger on that hallow’d spot;
Then slowly tear him from the witching scene.
Sigh forth one wish that such had been his lot.
Then turn to hate a world he had almost forgot.

Now, as composition, these lines may, perhaps, be called bad; they do not display the scope of their author’s genius, while beside Wordsworth’s masterpiece not only are they wanting in rapturous beauty, but in mere expression they seem to be insincere; and for this reason they do not, like Wordsworth’s, awaken in the reader the full emotion felt by the poet. So much must be admitted. But when it comes to the underlying ideas, I am not so sure. I cannot, in the first place, convince myself that the parts of Tintern Abbey, if carefully considered, do not contradict one another, that the sentiment of the lines which find the mystic charm of nature in its power to voice “the still, sad music of humanity,” is quite congenial with that of the passage which presents this same nature as a consolation for “the sneers of selfish men” and “the dreary intercourse of daily life.” There is likely always to be this irreconcilable contradiction between the general sympathy and the particular distaste of the enthusiast who sees the mystery of mankind refracted through the mist of setting suns. The illusion of the nature-worshipper and the deception of the humanitarian spring, indeed, from the same substitution of revery for judgment, and it is worthy of remark that Wordsworth, who mused so pathetically on the lot of the dalesmen about him, had no power of entering into their individual lives and was commonly distrusted by them. I discover no such mingling of the sentimentalist and the cynic in Byron’s stanzas, but a cynicism which, however shocking, is certainly consistent. And, going further, I feel a doubt in regard to Wordsworth’s essential philosophy of nature. Byron’s monk of Athos I can understand and allow for. Finding intolerable his loneliness amidst the conflict of egotisms we call society, he seeks the peace of real solitude where from his undisturbed lookout the world lies beneath him like a silent panorama. There, unvexed by the need of opposing will to human will, he can cultivate the higher will to refrain and lift his mind above nature into serene communication with itself and with its God. That is a different life from Wordsworth’s worship of nature, at least as that state of submission is expressed in Tintern Abbey:

. . . Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognize
In nature and the language of the sense.
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.

[To be continued.]