LECTURE VI.

In my last lecture I spoke of the meaning Wordsworth had for the term "Nature," of his conception of Nature as having a life of her own and of the characteristics of that life, its endless joy, central peace, and how all its forms, each having their own life, were knit together by unselfish love. But these are terms which are true of humanity also; we can say that human nature is capable of joy and peace and love, and Wordsworth does say that we see in Nature similar passions to our own. But though he thought them similar, he did not think them identical; he drew a clear distinction between them, between the life in Nature and that in Man. On this distinction I must now enlarge, in order that I may come to that part of my subject which treats of the education that Nature gives to man; a thought that pervades the whole of Wordsworth's poetry.

There are poets who impute to Nature their own moods. and feelings, as when Tennyson makes the larkspur listen for Maud's footstep, or when Coleridge, giving to natural things the power of man, makes the Wind an actor or a poet. This is what Ruskin calls the "pathetic fallacy;" and a few instances, such as the phrase "forlorn cascades,"

where the lonely water-fall seems to him abandoned by the world because he feels himself forlorn, exist in Wordsworth; but he always means to distinguish clearly between his own feelings and those which he believes belong to things outside himself. The Me and the not-Me are not the same. It is not the poet who makes Nature this or that by giving himself to her; it is she who builds up part of his being by communicating herself to him. It is not that the sea is in this or that special mood, because he is in it, or that the birds sing of certain things of which he is thinking, but that the sea has its own moods, and that the birds sing their own emotions:

The birds around me hopped and played

Their thoughts I cannot measure :

He does not define their thoughts: he is only certain that they do think, and have pleasure and pain of their

own:

But the least motion that they made

It secmed a thrill of pleasure.

It is the same thing with flowers and rocks and clouds ; he could not express their kind of existence, but he was certain of its being a feeling existence :

And 'tis my faith that every flower

Enjoys the air it breathes.

He is, of course, obliged to use the same terms as we use about our thinking and feeling, when he speaks of the life which natural things live, but he does not identify their thoughts and feelings with ours. They are similar to ours but they differ from ours, being conditioned by the different material through which they work, in a much

greater degree, though in the same way as the thoughts and feelings of a man differ from those of a woman.

It is important in reading Wordsworth to understand this clearly-this separate life of Nature and Man, this distinctness which enables a dramatic action to take

place between them. We have wholly got rid of the thought of Coleridge that Nature lives by the projection of our self upon it: we do not receive what we give, we give and receive back something wholly different. It is not the reflection of ourselves which we have from Nature, it is the friendship of another than ourselves.

It is this which makes Wordsworth's poetry so fresh, so healthy, and of such a morning quality. He forgets himself in the beauty, joy, and life of things; he will not spoil Nature by tracing in her any likeness to his own moods; he would not willingly have written that stanza in "In Memoriam," beginning with these lines:

Calm is the morn without a sound,

Calm as to suit a calmer grief:

they would have contradicted his philosophy-nor traced in the gathering storm and looming cloud the "wild despair" of grief which filled Tennyson's heart for the loss of his friend. Nor would he, even by permitting human associations to cluster thickly in certain places, prevent these places from making their own natural impression upon him—a thing which Tennyson does frequently. The whole of the descriptions of Nature in "In Memoriam" are tinged with one or the other of these faults: skies, flowers, clouds, and trees, are full of the self of the poet, or of recollections of his friend; and the result is that a partly morbid impression is left on the

reader, even in the triumphant passages at the end-an impression of the tyranny of Human Nature over Nature, of ourselves as being the only thing in the universewhich is a depressing element in the poem. It is painful to be deprived by this imposition of Man on Nature of the only chance we have of getting rid of ourselves, or of feeling another life than human life. It is the first excellence of Wordsworth that though he does not pass by this "pathetic fallacy" altogether, he only treats it as a transient and unhealthy phase.

The Poem on the picture of Peele Castle in a storm has been so explained as to be an example of this pathetic fallacy, but Wordsworth is true in it to his philosophy.

He sees in it the Sea at peace, but he does not see it as the image of his own peace. It has its own quiet from its own nature, not from his. Being thus distinct, it sends its impression of calm to influence his heart. That being received, the powers of his mind take it up, and add their own work to it, "the consecration and the Poet's dream." From both these things-from the impression passively received, and the active energy of thought upon it- -another thing arises, the poetic picture, the work of Art.

Ah! then, if mine had been the Painter's hand,

To express what then I saw; and add the gleam,
The light that never was, on sea or land,

The consecration, and the Poet's dream;

I would have planted thee, thou hoary Pile,
Amid a world how different from this!
Beside a sea that could not cease to smile;

On tranquil land, beneath a sky of bliss.

Thou shouldst have seemed a treasure-house divine
Of peaceful years; a chronicle of heaven;
Of all the sunbeams that did ever shine
The very sweetest had to thee been given.

A Picture had it been of lasting ease,
Elysian quiet, without toil or strife;
No motion but the moving tide, a breeze,
Or merely silent Nature's breathing life.

Such, in the fond illusion of my heart,

Such Picture would I at that time have made
And seen the soul of truth in every part,

A steadfast peace that might not be betrayed.

It is an illustration, in a small way, of what he means in the lines soon to be quoted, when he says that the individual mind and the external universe are fitted, in difference, to each other, and when wedded together accomplish a creation-something different from both-with blended might.

The latter part of the Poem is another side of the same thought, only the Art work which he wished to do for the calm, is done by Beaumont for the storm. He can no longer look on a calm sea and find the impression of calm. Something has happened which forbids it; the sea has engulphed his brother. But he neither imposes the storm in his own heart on the calm, nor sees the sea in the storm as in sorrow for his loss. The sea has its own anger and fury. But Beaumont has seen it in storm, and receiving from it an impression of anger, has added to that impression, by imagination, correlative human emotion, and composed both into one creation by Art. And on this creation Wordsworth loves to look. It, the human work, the artistic result of the blended might of Nature and