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THE NINETEENTH CENTURY AND AFTER

I

[By C. H. HERFORD]

POETS

WORDSWORTH

MR. STRONG'S essay on 'Nature in Wordsworth and Meredith (appended to his Studies in Shelley ') is a penetrating summary of the philosophic ideas underlying that which Wordsworth calls Nature' and Meredith 'Earth'. A peculiarly close and intense observation, scarcely paralleled in Nature poetry elsewhere, he rightly finds to be fundamental in each; striking as is the contrast, even where they are describing the same matter (such as the Nightingale's song), between the loftily abstract manner of the elder poet, and the vividly individualizing style of the younger. A like contrast (of which more might have been said) distinguishes the Nature element in their love-poetry. Three years she grew', which is coupled with 'Love in a Valley', is in comparison a piece of philosophy, exquisitely touched, and wholly concerned with the moulding of the maiden's form and soul by the scenes of her childhood; whereas in Meredith girl and scenery alike are suffused by the glow of the lover's passion. The vital distinction between them begins, for Mr. Strong, with the ulterior significance,

1 Three Studies in Shelley and an Essay on Nature in Wordsworth and Meredith, by Archibald T. Strong. Oxford University Press, 1921. pp. 189. 108. 6d.

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of ethic and metaphysic, which the two poets associate with 'Nature' or 'Earth'. The distinction is palpable, but has rarely been handled with so much insight and power. Meredith's Nature, based on a vigorous faith in evolution, excluded absolutely the personal immortality of which Wordsworth's offered 'intimations'; and while Meredith is a resolute champion of Spirit,' his Spirit in the last resort is sprung from matter, and has no existence outside man. Whereas Wordsworth's 'humanity' is but one embodiment of the 'something far more deeply interfused that rolls through all things'. Neither poet, it is clearly recognized, faces fully the view that Nature is fundamentally malevolent, and Mr. Strong contrasts pointedly with Meredith's robust optimism the terrible indictment brought by Alfred de Vigny in poems like La Maison du Berger (finely rendered here). Wordsworth, in pre-evolution days, had more excuse for his unreserved faith in the 'benignity' of Nature; but his profound sense of the significance of suffering--which has the nature of infinity'—and of duty, exempts him from the charge of a facile optimism. This is true, but Mr. Strong hardly faces the doubt, scarcely to be evaded by a modern reader, whether the Wordsworthian philosophy of suffering is adequate to the stupendous catastrophes of worldhistory. And he may be thought to undervalue the fortifying and stimulating power, under such conditions, of Meredith's masculine and irrepressible faith in Man and Earth. But of the great value of his essay there can be no question.

In his little monograph, William Wordsworth and Annette Vallon,2 M. Émile Legouis retells, with important supplementary facts, the story of the now well-known episode in Wordsworth's French residence, first narrated by Professor G. Harper in his Wordsworth, and later, more fully, in his Wordsworth's French Daughter. M. Legouis devotes his acute analysis to a fuller interpretation of the circumstances, which in some essential respects must remain conjectural. But he has also brought light, from French public archives and family information, upon the very un-Wordsworthian history of the Vallon family, and in

William Wordsworth and Annette Vallon, by Émile Legouis. Dent. pp. xiv +146. 5s.

particular upon Annette's activities in the Bourbon interest during the Napoleonic time, and her daughter's marriage, under the highest 'legitimist' auspices, in 1816. He prints, or facsimiles, a quantity of valuable material; in particular: (1) Letters of Annette to William and Dorothy; (2) Caroline Wordsworth's marriage certificate, and the petition addressed to Louis XVIII by a number of distinguished loyalists in her favour; (3) an account of Wordsworth's poetry written for his granddaughter in 1846, by a former professor of foreign literature'; a notable evidence of the vogue he had now acquired in France, through the influence especially of Sainte-Beuve and Lamartine. There are portraits of Caroline (with a speaking likeness to the poet), of Annette's brother, and (conjecturally) of Annette herself.

In his little volume, La Poesia di Wordsworth (1770–1808),3 Pietro Bardi gives a summary, but very sympathetic account of Wordsworth's early life and of his poetry up to the date named. For English readers it will be interesting chiefly as evidence of the hold that Wordsworth's 'insular' poetry can now obtain on a critic of the south of Europe. The book draws somewhat freely upon English critical work, but of the sincerity of the writer's admiration there can be no doubt. He draws the limit of what is admirable in Wordsworth somewhat peremptorily. His date bars out The Excursion altogether, and this (as was once rashly said of The Excursion itself) will never do'. The criticism is rarely individual, and when it is individual is occasionally perverse; as when The Evening Walk is assigned to the Hawkshead period (instead of, with M. Legouis-whose name is persistently misspelt,-to the Cambridge time) on the ground that not only the subject but all the details recall to mind the calm lakes and cloud-capt hills of Cumberland'. That is psychologically unsound: Signor Bardi might recall how Ibsen's most intensely Norwegian dramas were written in Italy, and how he said in reference to them: 'Never did I feel so near to the Home as precisely at a distance and in absence.' And Wordsworth's poetry too was 'emotion recollected in tranquillity'.

3 La Poesia di Wordsworth, by Pietro Bardi. Bari: Laterza. pp. 139. 8.50%.

In University of Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature, No. 2, pp. 225-270, Professor A. Beatty makes a further contribution to our understanding of Wordsworth's early intellectual history (cf. his 'Wordsworth and Hartley', N.Y. Nation, July 17, 1913, and his subsequent volume, to be noticed in the next volume of The Year's Work, William Wordsworth, his Doctrine and Art'). His essay, Joseph Fawcett, the Art of War', consists of (1) an annotated reprint of Fawcett's poem (1795), of which only a few copies are known, (2) a brief introduction tracing his connexion with Wordsworth and with Wordsworth's attitude towards war. The apparent inconsistency between the denunciations of war in Guilt and Sorrow and other poems about 1795, and the heroic temper of the war-sonnets, was freely ascribed by Byron and others to corrupt motives, and has later been commonly ascribed to a radical change of view. Mr. Beatty shows that the antimilitarism of the English Revolutionary group led by Godwin and Fawcett, to which Wordsworth in 1795 was closely attached, was primarily political and social even more than humanitarian; war was the instrument of kings and aristocrats for crushing democracy. Fawcett's poem is the most systematic exposition of this view. Later, when it became the instrument of the 'Men of Kent' or the Tyrolese against Napoleon, Wordsworth could thence without inconsistency justify it. And Godwin himself had expressly excepted from his general condemnation the two cases' defence of our own liberty and of the liberty of others'.

Wordsworth's Gospel of Nature is discussed (in P. M. L. A. xxxvii. 4, pp. 615-38) by Mr. Barry Cerf. Mr. Barry Cerf expresses in an incisive and somewhat peremptory form the reaction from the 'poet of Nature' view of Wordsworth which has for some time been making headway in America, often in association with the more comprehensive attack upon the Romantic or Rousseauist temper and its products, led by Mr. Irving Babbitt and Mr. P. E. More. Wordsworth reached supreme heights in poetry; in ethical grandeur he is unsurpassed; but he was wrong in ascribing either excellence to 'communion with nature'. The 'wise passiveness' to the influence of the 'linnets song' and 'the vernal woods' enjoined in the Lyrical Ballads, and the diatribes

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against science and art, expressed merely an indolent willingness to 'get wise without thought'. Even Tintern Abbey is gravely at fault in so far as it presupposes a spiritual influence derived from nature. 'Its greatness is not derived from sensuous responsiveness to nature, but from the English civilization which Wordsworth inherited and interpreted with the aid of faculties far removed from the five senses.' This is not the place for discussion of Mr. Cerf's Its importance lies in his forcible reassertion of 'the Mind of Man' as in reality (as Wordsworth himself said) the theme and substance of his poetry; its weakness in an arbitrary ruling out of everything in the influence of 'Nature' but its action upon our senses. The new emphasis upon Thought and Will which is marked by the poetry of 1805 did not mean a dissolution of that 'wedded' union with Nature which he had once proclaimed; 'dream not of every severance of our loves' he still cries to the Meadows, Hills, and Groves, at the close of the great Ode (1806); and when Mr. Cerf quotes from the Ecclesiastical Sonnets a reference to 'sinful Nature' as a sign of spiritual advance, he is surely in danger of 'emptying the child out with the bath'— dismissing the Poet along with the poet of Nature, and saving only the Anglican theologian. But the essay is important and full of acute remarks.

In his essay on The Doctrine of Leadership in the Greater Romantic Poets (P. M. L. A. xxxvii. pp. 639, 61), Mr. B. H. Lehman carries further the study of their politics by Mr. W. Graham, noticed in Volume II of The Year's Work (pp. 156-7). Recognizing a definite, perhaps fundamental, antagonism between the doctrine of the Great Man, or 'Hero', and Rousseauist or democratic Equality, he traces the ways in which Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Byron, dealt with the dilemma thus presented. In Wordsworth, even in his most republican days, the 'heroic' ideal was always implicit, and the ethical grandeur of the Cintra Tract rests, as Mr. Lehman well says, upon a kind of fusion of the two, in which the people itself becomes 'heroic' in wisdom and virtue. With Coleridge the distinction is sharper, and takes colour after 1800 from his metaphysical psychology; the 'leader'is the man in whom 'Reason' and 'Understanding' are synthetically