Wordsworth (Part 3)

(Pictured: Wordsworth.) Having left the writings of Irving Babbitt, we are delving into the essays of Paul Elmer More. I am happy to present now the third 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 3)

“Nature never did betray the heart that loved her,” he adds in the new flush of his pantheistic creed; yet as one reads the letters written in later life, when death had found an entrance to his chosen valleys, when disease had troubled the mind of his dearest companion, and other cares had stolen upon him in his retreat, it becomes clear that Nature did betray and cast him upon other consolations. Nor are his letters alone in presenting the decline of his life as clouded by a certain inner distrust. In June of 1849 Miss Fenwick writes that “his darker moods are more frequent, though at other times he is as strong and as bright as ever. . . . His is a strong but not a happy old age.“ And Mr. Yarnall, who from America visited him in the same year, found that “the expression of his countenance was sad, mournful I might say; he seemed one on whom sorrow pressed heavily.“ Something of this sense of betrayal sounds to my ears in one of his pathetic admissions, made to an unknown correspondent: 

“What I lament most is that the spirituality of my nature does not expand and rise the nearer I approach the grave, as yours does, and as it fares with my beloved partner. The pleasure which I derive from God’s works in his visible creation is not, I think, impaired with me. . . .” 

That is not the tone of his earlier confidence in pantheistic admiration to lighten and sustain the soul. From Nature he has turned to a very old-fashioned God of nature; and in the end we may believe that he discovered in religion the true peace he so beautifully boasted of in his youth. “I am standing,“ he writes to a friend across the estranging ocean of this world, who was solicitous about the poet’s fame—“I am standing on the brink of that vast ocean I must sail so soon; I must speedily lose sight of the shore; and I could not once have conceived how little I am now troubled by the thought of how long or short a time they who remain on that shore may have sight of me.”

No, we may as well come to admit that there is something hollow and at bottom false in that blessed mood of revery by which we are laid asleep in body and become a living soul at one with the motion and the spirit of the wide-expanded world; that, on a lower scale, there is something unsatisfactory—dare I say ludicrous?—in thus consecrating a life to nature, as in reverence to Wordsworth, we have so long talked of doing. Solitude as a means of ascetic discipline may have its brave and terrible rewards: life in the country with its various duties may be salubrious, and may add to work its purifying exaltations; but to go out into scenery as “a dedicated Spirit,” to cultivate a chronic habit of admiration, to hang upon the seasons’ every mood for the sake of harvesting the “gentle agitations of the mind,” to prod the imagination deliberately that no day may lack its “matins and vespers of harmonious verse,” in a word to make a poetical business of nature—this will never do. 

And, more particularly, there are aspects of Wordsworth’s priestly function that leave a certain distaste. It is perhaps permitted a prophet to eschew books, even though his own pulpit is the printed page, and in particular Wordsworth had at times the excuse of weak eyes for not reading them, and of poverty for not buying; yet that little cupboard library in his chamber, with its handful of chance volumes, looks more like intellectual straitness than austerity. “As to buying books,” he says in a letter, “I can affirm that on new books I have not spent five shillings for the last five years; I include reviews, magazines, pamphlets, etc.,etc.” Somehow after this it annoys one to find him in another letter, only a few pages on, ordering seven casts of the Chantrey bust of himself, and asking the price of fifteen or twenty. But his library and study were out of doors; there, among the trees on the hillside, he found the knowledge he desired and to their music attuned his own rhythmic song. And then, we remember the old inn-keeper’s account of his ways as reported by Canon Rawnsley: “Many’s the time,“said he, “I’ve seed him a takin’ his family out in a string, and niver geein’ the deariest bit of notice to ’em; standin’ by hissel’ and stoppin’ behind agapin’, wi’ his jaws workin’ the whoal time; but niver no crackin’ wi’ ’em, nor no pleasure in ’em—a desolate-minded man, ye kna. . . . It was potry as did it.” That is but a clown’s version of what inspired in Wordsworth a lovely sonnet: “Most sweet it is with un-uplifted eyes”; no doubt, and yet we would rather not picture to ourselves the poet thus “booing about” the roads in the exercise of his profession. 

The habit in Wordsworth’s case was more specially, it should appear, the result of that low physical vitality, which made him shrink from action, joined to a troubled moral sense, which sought ease of conscience in communion with a passive unmoral nature. His intellect was always keenly active, but some vice of the blood shut him out from participation in the larger current of life. For the world the result was a great volume of dull verse, which we have been compelled to regard as consecrated in a way to which no other poetry can quite lay claim. It is time we were emancipated from that romantic illusion. Yet withal I trust I am not blind to the great, if spasmodic, accomplishment of Wordsworth. It is perfectly true that we may read through pages of weary metaphysics and self-maunderings of tortured prose, and then suddenly come upon a passage whose inevitable beauty flashes upon the soul like a burning search-light. Who, for example, shall forget his first surprise when, after reading in The Prelude of the college kitchens and their “humming sound, less tunable than bees,” he passed to the description of Newton’s statue: 

The marble index of a mind for ever 
Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone? 

And there are amid his lesser works that waver “between silliness and pathos,” whole poems—it is unnecessary to name them—of a lyric grace that forever sings itself in memory, or of a naked classic grandeur that awes and subdues the mind. Only, I cannot see why the purple patches in The Prelude and The Excursion should make us blink the fact that the former would have been better as a whole in prose, and that the latter would have been better not to have been at all. Nor can I see why, to appreciate the melody of The Solitary Reaper, whose 

voice, like the song of a bird retreating into the forest, draws us on to follow the lure of the world’s undiscoverable secret
beauty—

A voice so thrilling ne’er was heard 
In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird, 
Breaking the silence of the seas 
Among the farthest Hebrides. 
Will no one tell me what she sings?—

why we should need to pass through the initiation of Poor Susan’s doggerel: 

At the comer of Wood Street, when daylight appears, 
Hangs a Thrush that sings loud, it has sung for three years.

The wonder is that the same poet should have written both poems, and that a critic like Matthew Arnold should have given them equal value in his book of selections. The poet’s temperament and manner of composition may in part account for these anomalies. One seems to see him starting out with a hard determination to flog his sluggish blood into motion; as he proceeds, he grows into a tense nervous state of expectancy: 

My apprehensions come in crowds; 
I dread the rustling of the grass; 
The very shadows of the clouds 
Have power to shake me as they pass: 
I question things and do not find
One that will answer to my mind; 
And all the world appears unkind.

One can see the haggard search for inspiration in his eyes: “They were fires half burning, half smoldering,” said Leigh Hunt, who himself never needed to jog his jaunty muse, “with a sort of acrid fixture of regard, and seated at the further end of two caverns.” Too commonly the fire merely glimmered and smoked to the close; but at times and without warning, most often, one fancies, in moments of extreme lassitude when the will to write had succumbed to the fatigue of the body (or in other happier moments when the will was caught entirely off guard)—then suddenly the wayward breath of heaven blew upon him, the flame leaped up clear and warm, and the miracle of perfect verse was wrought. So, at least, one thinks to explain the “inevitableness“ of his greater work amid so much of sad mechanic exercise. It is, in Arnold’s image, almost as if Nature at these times took the pen out of his hands and made him her spokesman, in spite of his self-willed consecration. 

And for us may be the profit of those golden moments. For with all the talk of these years the world is indeed too much with us, and little we see in nature that is ours. It is a question whether, despite our poetic convention, we have really as keen and single-hearted an enjoyment of the Outworld, to use Henry More’s term, as did the generations that preceded Wordsworth. For the most part we are like Alphius of the Latin poem, always about to abandon ourselves to rustic delights, yet still tangled in the toils of the market. And so we may come honestly to this poet as to one who held in his gift the divine medicine of contemplation—

But where will Europe’s latter hour 
Again find Wordsworth’s healing power? 

We shall not be true if we speak of his life in nature as a perfect ideal, for such revery as he taught is but a surrender to the ever-intruding sense of the world’s defeat, and human fate is something greater than stocks and stones, the stars that control our destiny are higher than the constellation of mountain flowers, and the meaning of mankind is better guessed in the clamour of society or in the still voice of the heart withdrawn into its own solitude than in the murmur of the evening wind; but all of us may drink in fresh courage and renewed vigour from seasons of wise passiveness. In this view his reproach is not, like Shelley’s, a question of essential falseness, but of exclusion on the one side and of exaggeration on the other. His excess may be our balance, and in his inspiration we may learn to regulate the gusty, self-wearing passions of the mind: 

Ye motions of delight, that haunt the sides 
Of the green hills; ye breezes and soft airs, 
Whose subtle intercourse with breathing flowers. 
Feelingly watched, might teach Man’s haughty race 
How without injury to take, to give 
Without offence; ye who, as if to show 
The wondrous influence of power gently used, 
Bend the complying heads of lordly pines,
And, with a touch, shift the stupendous clouds 
Through the whole compass of the sky; ye brooks, 
Muttering along the stones, a busy noise 
By day, a quiet sound in silent night; 
Ye waves, that out of the great deep steal forth 
In a calm hour to kiss the pebbly shore, 
Not mute, and then retire, fearing no storm; 
And you, ye groves, whose ministry it is 
To interpose the covert of your shades, 
Even as a sleep, between the heart of man 
And outward troubles, between man himself, 
Not seldom, and his own uneasy heart: 
Oh! that I had a music and a voice 
Harmonious as your own, that I might tell 
What ye have done for me.

[Concluded.]