Studies in Literature | Page 8

of value to the work that he had already done. The public
appreciation of it was very slow. The most influential among the critics
were for long hostile and contemptuous. Never at any time did
Wordsworth come near to such popularity as that of Scott or of Byron.
Nor was this all. For many years most readers of poetry thought more
even of Lalla Rookh than of the Excursion. While Scott, Byron, and
Moore were receiving thousands of pounds, Wordsworth received
nothing. Between 1830 and 1840 the current turned in Wordsworth's
direction, and when he received the honour of a doctor's degree at the
Oxford Commemoration in 1839, the Sheldonian theatre made him the
hero of the day. In the spring of 1843 Southey died, and Sir Robert Peel
pressed Wordsworth to succeed him in the office of Poet-Laureate. "It
is a tribute of respect," said the Minister, "justly due to the first of
living poets." But almost immediately the light of his common
popularity was eclipsed by Tennyson, as it had earlier been eclipsed by
Scott, by Byron, and in some degree by Shelley. Yet his fame among
those who know, among competent critics with a right to judge, to-day
stands higher than it ever stood. Only two writers have contributed so
many lines of daily popularity and application. In the handbooks of
familiar quotations Wordsworth fills more space than anybody save
Shakespeare and Pope. He exerted commanding influence over great
minds that have powerfully affected our generation. "I never before,"
said George Eliot in the days when her character was forming itself
(1839), "met with so many of my own feelings expressed just as I
should like them," and her reverence for Wordsworth remained to the
end. J.S. Mill has described how important an event in his life was his
first reading of Wordsworth. "What made his poems a medicine for my
state of mind was that they expressed not mere outward beauty, but

states of feeling and of thought coloured by feeling, under the
excitement of beauty. I needed to be made to feel that there was real
permanent happiness in tranquil contemplation. Wordsworth taught me
this, not only without turning away from, but with greatly increased
interest in the common feelings and common destiny of human beings"
_(Autobiog_., 148). This effect of Wordsworth on Mill is the very
illustration of the phrase of a later poet of our own day, one of the most
eminent and by his friends best beloved of all those whom Wordsworth
had known, and on whom he poured out a generous portion of his own
best spirit:--
Time may restore us in his course Goethe's sage mind and Byron's
force. But where will Europe's latter hour Again find Wordsworth's
healing power?
It is the power for which Matthew Arnold found this happy designation
that compensates us for that absence of excitement of which the
heedless complain in Wordsworth's verse--excitement so often meaning
mental fever, hysterics, distorted passion, or other fitful agitation of the
soul.
Pretensions are sometimes advanced as to Wordsworth's historic
position, which involve a mistaken view of literary history. Thus, we
are gravely told by the too zealous Wordsworthian that the so-called
poets of the eighteenth century were simply men of letters; they had
various accomplishments and great general ability, but their thoughts
were expressed in prose, or in mere metrical diction, which passed
current as poetry without being so. Yet Burns belonged wholly to the
eighteenth century (1759-96), and no verse-writer is so little literary as
Burns, so little prosaic; no writer more truly poetic in melody, diction,
thought, feeling, and spontaneous song. It was Burns who showed
Wordsworth's own youth "How verse may build a princely throne on
humble truth." Nor can we understand how Cowper is to be set down as
simply a man of letters. We may, too, if we please, deny the name of
poetry to Collins's tender and pensive _Ode to Evening_; but we can
only do this on critical principles, which would end in classing the
author of Lycidas and _Comus_, of the Allegro and _Penseroso_, as a
writer of various accomplishments and great general ability, but at
bottom simply a man of letters and by no means a poet. It is to Gray,
however, that we must turn for the distinctive character of the best

poetry of the eighteenth century. With reluctance we will surrender the
Pindaric Odes, though not without risking the observation that some of
Wordsworth's own criticism on Gray is as narrow and as much beside
the mark as Jeffrey's on the Excursion. But the Ode on Eton College is
not to have grudged to it the noble name and true quality of poetry,
merely because, as one of Johnson's most unfortunate criticisms
expresses it, the ode suggests nothing to