OF CALIF THE POETS WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 1770-1850 AN Evangelist among the heathen for thirty years. Supreme Pontiff for twenty. What is he now ? No student of literature can doubt what he was. In the history of learning Crusades are no novelties. The eighteenth century has a monopoly of crusading in poetry. Goethe and Schiller in Germany, de Musset, Victor Hugo, with the Romancists, in France, Wordsworth, at the head of the Lake School, in England, sang and fought, sang to fight. Elizabethan poets waged no wars; they were discoverers without being in the realm of fancy buccaneers, as some of them were on the Spanish Main. These others were invaders of established kingdoms, as were the Israelites of Canaan. Of all the combatant poets Wordsworth had set himself the hardest task, and won the most signal victory. His hand was against every man. He did not shun to wound a natural ally, a forerunner, like Cowper, an observer of rural life, like Thomson, in the blind battle! A fanatic doubtless, at once of wide views, and narrow ; but it was he who, though in the panoply of a Captain, fighting for the most part alone, taught how to replace poetic diction and epigrams by poetic ideas clothed in plain, pure English, with rhythm to match. Above all, it is to him mainly that literature owes the solemn inauguration of the worship of Nature. He threw down, and he built up. Though undoubtedly heralded by Cowper he substantially opened the new age of English verse, which closes for us with Tennyson. His famous brethren in song, more or less unconsciously, even mocking Byron, underwent his influence, while apparently they kept their independence. The later poetry of the nineteenth century has been, as a whole, though with some addition of melody, of his house and lineage. He accomplished a grand work in virtue of splendid poetic gifts, extraordinary philosophic insight, and obstinate, indomitable courage. As necessary a property for him, I fear, was, as for all great poets, Shakespeare, and perhaps Scott excepted, an absolute, and, in his case, innocent, incapacity for recognizing the existence of singers besides himself. Is it an intelligible contradiction in terms to say that, while he was addicted to warm moral indignation, and admiration, he had a cold heart? An absence of the sense of humour was a part of his equipment which was, perhaps, essential. If it blinded him to absurdities in the exaggeration of his critical principles, it also steeled him against ignorant ridicule. Gallantly he flung down before adversaries, whom his inspiration bewildered and enraged no less than his eccentricities, the gauntlet of his Peter Bell, weathercockless Kilve, Childless Timothy, Expostulation and Reply, with divers more as strange! Then, when the poet ceased to sing unless to an inner circle, what wisdom still, what understanding of the soul of things! The priest remained, with the inherent sanctity which had justified his original investiture with the poet's mantle. We feel him ready to go on prophesying should the commission be renewed; blissfully unconscious of the probable Never. Literary history shows few more pathetic figures than the old man, when visible within the diminished circle of his disciples; |