ΧΧΙ

THE LAST DECADE OF THE LAST

CENTURY

(From The Contemporary Review for Sept. 1892)

T is just a hundred and one years since a certain undergraduate of St John's College, Cambridge, by name Wordsworth, took his Bachelor's Degree and went his way into the world. The studies of the University had not greatly attracted him, at least so as to pursue them in the spirit that wins 'marks' and produces 'Wranglers.' 'William, you may have heard,' writes his sister to her friend, Miss Pollard, in June 1791, 'lost the chance (indeed, the certainty) of a fellowship by not combating his inclinations. He gave way to his natural dislike to study so dry as many parts of mathematics; consequently could not succeed at Cambridge. He reads Italian, Spanish, French, Greek, Latin, and English, but never opens a mathematical book.' And he himself speaks, in a letter to his sister, of his having acquainted his uncle (his mother's brother, the Rev. Dr Cookson) with his having given up 'all thoughts of a fellowship.' Only in a general way did mathematics, which in the Procrustean system of the then Cambridge formed the main occupation of the place, excite his interest and admiration :

Yet may we not entirely overlook

The pleasure gathered from the rudiments
Of geometric science. Though advanced
In these enquiries, with regret I speak,
No farther than the threshold, there I found
Both elevation and composed delight;
With Indian awe and wonder, ignorance pleased
With its own struggles, did I meditate
On the relation those abstractions bear
To Nature's laws, and by what process led,
Those immaterial agents bowed their heads
Duly to serve the mind of earth-born man;
From star to star, from kindred sphere to sphere,
From system on to system without end.

More frequently from the same source I drew
A pleasure quiet and profound, a sense

Of permanent and universal sway,
And paramount belief; there, recognised
A type, for finite natures, of the one

Supreme Existence, the surpassing life
Which-to the boundaries of space and time,

Of melancholy space and doleful time,

Superior and incapable of change,

Nor touched by welterings of passion-is,

And hath the name of, God. Transcendent peace
And silence did await upon these thoughts

That were a frequent comfort to my youth.

Prelude, Bk. vi.

So that it was not so much the spirit of these great studies, as the spirit in which they were prosecuted, that discouraged him from taking them up. He felt then as he felt and wrote some years afterwards, that there is no real antagonism between Poetry and Science. 'Poetry,' he wrote in the preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads, 'is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science. ... If the labours of men of science should ever create any material revolution,

direct or indirect, in our condition, and in the impressions which we habitually receive, the poet will sleep no more than at present; he will be ready to follow the steps of the men of science, not only in those general indirect effects, but he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of science itself.' Thus, after all, the future poet's soul may have found some food and sustenance in the Cambridge atmosphere. And his experience may be of some significance if any one should thoroughly investigate the striking fact that so many of our chief poetical geniuses from Spenser to Tennyson have been bred in an university especially devoted to 'exact' studies. Probably there are other respects in which Wordsworth's Cambridge life did more for him than he thought-more, at all events, than he acknowledges in that careful analysis he gives in the Prelude of his development and growth, and more than any one of his biographers has yet fully ascertained. Still, it remains true that during his residence at Cambridge he had no high opinion of the place, which, indeed, was not then at its best; nor had the place any very high opinion of him. He achieved no academic distinction; he was 'disturbed at times' by

a strangeness in the mind,

A feeling that I was not for that hour,
Nor for that place;

and when he had completed his terms and ceased to

frequent the college groves

And tributary walks,

no one dreamt that in the crowd of Bachelors that 'went down' just a century since was one who would in course of time be ranked amongst the most famous of the many famous sons of St John's-one who would make an epoch in English literature.

In that same year (1791) there went 'up' to Jesus College of the same University one Samuel Taylor Coleridge, he, too, not ever to take kindly to the then academic ways and limits, though he was a classical scholar of considerable attainments, and won a University prize for Greek verse. Already a brilliant talker, and, as always, a man of a restlessly active mind and thirsty for new ideas, he availed himself much more than did Wordsworth of the social advantages which are one of the most precious benefits of a University career-I mean the advantages of a thorough interchange and comparison of opinions with his contemporaries, though indeed from the very beginning Coleridge seems to have shone rather in monologue than dialogue, and from the beginning his companions seem to have been ready to sit and listen to his wonderful outpourings. At one time pecuniary and other troubles beset him, partly at least due to his own thoughtlessness; and he disappeared, and no one at Cambridge or elsewhere knew what had become of him. Presently discovered by his writing a Latin sentence (Eheu ! quam infortunii miserrimum est fuisse felicem) on the wall of a stable-he had enlisted as a light dragoon-he came back to the University and 'kept' two more terms; but as through certain theological scruples, which the kindly Master of his college in vain discussed with him, he could take no degree, he declined the final examination; and in December 1794 his connection with Cambridge finally ceased. Nor in his case, though he was more highly thought of than Wordsworth, was there any conception that he was to be one of the chief beginners of a new literary age.

Nor, in the last decade of the last century, if Cambridge was so unconscious of the promise and prowess of two such illustrious men, was the world at large better-sighted and better-informed as to the great movement that was then in

T

fact taking place. Works like the Pleasures of Memory, published in 1791, Darwin's Loves of the Plants (the second part of the Botanic Garden), his Zoonomia or Laws of Organic Life, and Physiologia, published respectively in 1791, 1794-6 and 1799, and the Pleasures of Hope, published in 1799, might well leave the impression that the old poetical paths were still being trodden. The 'Kingdom of Heaven,' we are told, 'cometh not with observation.' And the same may be said of other spiritual kingdoms. The world is slow to recognise a new note in poetry; it is slow merely to listen and attend to it. The old songs and the old voices occupy its ear, absorb its interest, monopolise its admiration, and to turn to new singers seems a kind of treason. It has been said that every new poet has to make an audience for himself. Certainly his audience is likely to be but small at first; and for a time the people at large doubt whether the faith of his scanty band of hearers is not a mere craze, or a mere transitory illusion or delusion. And indeed, amidst a great mingling of cries it requires some sensitiveness to select the one that is best worth hearing, and which the coming generations will hear with delight. It is easy to prophesy after the event-to assume the prophetic mantle, and solemnly re-anoint and crown him who is already known to be born a king. Still, contemporary criticism in great periods is for the most part a marvel, and the perusal of it should certainly inspire us in our day with a profound humility and an undogmatic caution.

Looking back to the close of the last century, we nowadays can easily discern, to a large extent at least, the signs of the times. Figures that reached no great height as their age saw them, have become colossal to us; and, vice versâ, some figures that were then thought gigantic have become smaller and smaller-have dwindled into the puniest dwarfs.