Studies in Literature | Page 2

history of human genius, may measure the great transition that
Wordsworth's eighty years witnessed in some of men's deepest feelings
about art and life and "the speaking face of earth and heaven."
Here, too, Wordsworth stood isolated and apart. Scott and Southey
were valued friends, but, as has been truly said, he thought little of

Scott's poetry, and less of Southey's. Of Blake's Songs of Innocence and
Experience he said, "There is something in the madness of this man
which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter
Scott." Coleridge was the only member of the shining company with
whom he ever had any real intimacy of mind, for whom he ever
nourished real deference and admiration as one "unrelentingly
possessed by thirst of greatness, love, and beauty," and in whose
intellectual power, as the noble lines in the Sixth Book of the Prelude
so gorgeously attest, he took the passionate interest of a man at once
master, disciple, and friend. It is true to say, as Emerson says, that
Wordsworth's genius was the great exceptional fact of the literature of
his period. But he had no teachers nor inspirers save nature and
solitude.
Wordsworth was the son of a solicitor, and all his early circumstances
were homely, unpretentious, and rather straitened. His mother died
when he was eight years old, and when his father followed her five
years later, two of his uncles provided means for continuing at
Cambridge the education which had been begun in the rural
grammar-school of Hawkshead. It was in 1787 that he went up to St.
John's College. He took his Bachelor's degree at the beginning of 1791,
and there his connection with the university ended.
For some years after leaving Cambridge, Wordsworth let himself drift.
He did not feel good enough for the Church; he shrank from the law;
fancying that he had talents for command, he thought of being a soldier.
Meanwhile, he passed a short time desultorily in London. Towards the
end of 1791, through Paris, he passed on to Orleans and Blois, where
he made some friends and spent most of a year. He returned to Paris in
October 1792. France was no longer standing on the top of golden
hours. The September massacres filled the sky with a lurid flame.
Wordsworth still retained his ardent faith in the Revolution, and was
even ready, though no better than "a landsman on the deck of a ship
struggling with a hideous storm," to make common cause with the
Girondists. But the prudence of friends at home forced him back to
England before the beginning of the terrible year of '93. With his return
closed that first survey of its inheritance, which most serious souls are
wont to make in the fervid prime of early manhood.
It would be idle to attempt any commentary on the bare facts that we

have just recapitulated; for Wordsworth himself has clothed them with
their full force and meaning in the Prelude. This record of the growth
of a poet's mind, told by the poet himself with all the sincerity of which
he was capable, is never likely to be popular. Of that, as of so much
more of his poetry, we must say that, as a whole, it has not the musical,
harmonious, sympathetic quality which seizes us in even the prose of
such a book as Rousseau's Confessions. Macaulay thought the Prelude
a poorer and more tiresome _Excursion_, with the old flimsy
philosophy about the effect of scenery on the mind, the old crazy
mystical metaphysics, and the endless wilderness of twaddle; still he
admits that there are some fine descriptions and energetic declamations.
All Macaulay's tastes and habits of mind made him a poor judge of
such a poet as Wordsworth. He valued spirit, energy, pomp, stateliness
of form and diction, and actually thought Dryden's fine lines about
to-morrow being falser than the former clay equal to any eight lines in
Lucretius. But his words truly express the effect of the Prelude on more
vulgar minds than his own. George Eliot, on the other hand, who had
the inward eye that was not among Macaulay's gifts, found the Prelude
full of material for a daily liturgy, and it is easy to imagine how she
fondly lingered, as she did, over such a thought as this--
"There is One great society alone on earth: The noble Living and the
noble Dead."
There is, too, as may be found imbedded even in Wordsworth's dullest
work, many a line of the truest poetical quality, such as that on
Newton's statue in the silent Chapel of Trinity College--
"The marble index of a mind for ever Voyaging through strange seas of
Thought alone."
Apart, however, from beautiful lines like this, and from many noble
passages of