The sword, the banner, and the field, Awake! (not Greece - she is awake!) Tread those reviving passions down, If thou regrett'st thy youth, why live? Seek out-less often sought than found - A word may be added of his friend and biographer Thomas Moore, who enjoyed while living a fame perhaps beyond his merits, but has since been most unduly depreciated. Few men, if any, of that day did more to restore the singing quality to English verse, and the best of his Irish Melodies rank only below the songs of Burns. The long narrative poems, Lalla Rookh and the Loves of the Angels, oriental in subject, by which he invited comparison with Byron's early work, are fallen into neglect, from which they will scarcely recover. Moore's real importance is, however, not strictly in English literature. He is the founder of an Irish literature in the English tongue as distinct in kind as that which within the same period has grown up in America. CHAPTER XVIII THE LAKE SCHOOL HOWEVER criticism may rank his work relatively to that of his great contemporaries, it seems clear that Wordsworth is the poet who produced most effect not only on poetry, but on the whole thought of the nineteenth century: perhaps because he differed less than the other great ones from the normal standard of Englishmen in gifts of the mind and in ideals of conduct. He was never, like Shelley, a spirit scarcely clad in flesh, fretting against the rules imposed by a world which knows. well that most of its members are not moved solely by benevolence; he never possessed securely, like Keats, "the glory of words," the sensuous beauty of phrase; he had none of Byron's meteoric brilliance, none of Scott's narrative power or gathered riches of knowledge; in subtlety and persuasiveness of thought, as in the bewildering magic of romance, his intimate Coleridge far surpassed him. And yet Wordsworth's very limitations were a help rather than a hindrance to one whose avowed purpose was to make poetry out of the commonest wayside experiences of life, and with the language used in the commonest speech of men. 329 His life, in its external circumstances, can be told in few words. Born in 1770, the son of a landagent in Cumberland, he passed without distinction from a local school to Cambridge, and from Cambridge into the world. But the world was then in a very unusual ferment, and two visits to France in 1790 and 1791 brought him in touch with revolutionary politicians, with whom he was actually preparing to throw in his lot when his guardians recalled him. He lived on in England without a profession, devoting himself more and more to poetry. In 1795 a bequest of £900 enabled him to set up house with his sister Dorothy in Dorsetshire, till in 1797 he met Coleridge and removed to Somerset to be near the Coleridges at Nether Stowey, where the poets spent together a year momentous for both. Lyrical Ballads, published jointly by them in 1798, was the outcome. Then after a winter in Germany, Wordsworth settled with his sister in the Lake country, his birthplace, and the cradle of his imagination: married, and lived there for half a century, in which his genius passed from a storm of contemptuous criticism into the full splendour of fame. He was made Laureate at the death of Southey in 1843, and died in 1850. But, long though Wordsworth lived, and though he wrote poetry to the end of his days, the essential part of his poetic work is almost entirely comprised in the decade 1797-1807. It is true that The Excursion was written later than this and published in 1814 — the only instalment of a great philosophical poem which was to be called The Recluse; and The Excursion admittedly contains fine passages. But they are smothered in inferior work; and endurance is taxed even by The Prelude (completed in 1805, but only published after the poet's death), which, as preliminary to The Recluse, THE LAKE SCHOOL 331 relates at immense length the poet's spiritual history. Matthew Arnold was of opinion that his own Selection comprised all that the ordinary lover of poetry need care to read. But it has been pointed out with great justice by Professor Raleigh that in order to understand Wordsworth fully we must realise how he arrived at his purpose and his conclusions, and that to do so fully we must read The Prelude. Nevertheless it may be allowed that for many lovers of poetry this is a counsel of perfection. The central fact in Wordsworth's life is the tremendous spiritual crisis brought on him by the French Revolution. He went up to Cambridge a youth who half consciously delighted in the face of nature, in the free air of the hills, and the "glad animal movements" of his body among them. But in the impressionable years of youth he was caught by the noble infection of the time, when it seemed that all the buttressed and defended Bastilles of the world, its injustices and anomalies, were going to topple before the wrath of pure Reason. He has described it in imperishable lines : Oh! pleasant exercise of hope and joy! For mighty were the auxiliars, which then stood But to be young was very heaven! Oh! times, Of custom, law, and statute, took at once 332 THE MASTERS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE What temper at the prospect did not wake To happiness unthought of? The inert Were roused, and lively natures rapt away! Elsewhere in The Prelude we read of his journey down the Rhone, in 1790, in company with delegates returning from Paris, and the joyous greetings which at every halting place were showered on these Guests welcome almost as the angels were To Abraham of old. He has described also his growing hatred of the evidences of oppression in France, his growing zeal for liberty. But while he was still in the country there came the bloody tale of the September massacres, and in December he returned-or was recalled to England. Two months later his own country was at war with what still seemed to him the righteous home of Revolution. He has told us in what bitterness of spirit he lived through the days when he could pray only for England's defeat, an alien among his own blood. It was in that ferment of feeling that he found (rather than sought) the inflowing of tranquillity from the heart of nature, among the Steep and lofty cliffs, Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect So he wrote in 1798, the year of his fullest power, revisiting the Wye valley after a lapse of five years, and looking back in gratitude; for, he says: These beauteous forms, Through a long absence, have not been to me |