Albeit lifeless then, and doomed to sleep The very excitement which, in early life, absorbs the powers of the mind is found, long after it has passed away, to have acted as a mnemonic; just as any acute physical pain suffered amidst beautiful scenery often serves to stamp the image of that beauty on the memory with singular vividness and persistence, when the pain itself has become an indifferent and purely intellectual reminiscence. The flogging of boys, as a means of impressing on them the rules of the Latin grammar, has been advocated on the same grounds by psychologists of time past. They were right in attributing an impressive virtue to a flogging, though there seems to be no guarantee that the rules of the Latin grammar are what will be impressed. Words worth, who, in his vocation as a poet, made it his business to investigate "the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement," never ceased to be grateful to his teacher Nature for the discipline that set his own hungers and fears and wild impulses to flog him in his childhood, so that the forms and images of the high, enduring things that stood around him were branded into his mind and heart for ever. Both in the Prelude and in the Lines written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey he is careful to distinguish the several stages of his education by Nature, and the several phases of his love for her. During the first of these stages, he says, Nature was But secondary to my own pursuits And animal activities, and all These activities and pleasures by degrees lost their charm, yet his love of Nature, for her own sake, at the same time grew deep and intense : The props of my affections were removed, This second phase of his love for Nature baffled his own powers of description :— : I cannot paint What then I was. The sounding cataract Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock, The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, That had no need of a remoter charm, By thought supplied, or any interest And it lasted, by his own account, until he was more than two and twenty-that is to say, until the fever of political thought and passion drove it out. When the crisis was past, the love of Nature returned to him, but shorn of its old despotism; it was subdued to a dominant scheme of thought, and became fellow-inmate in his mind with the love of man, and with a deep sense of the pathos of things. The roots of Wordsworth's poetic mysticism drew their life from this virgin passion. He falters and apologises whenever he attempts to describe it. Yet some passages in the Prelude give help to those who can piece them out with the memory of their own experiences. It was a despotism of the senses that held sway over him, a life of the senses so strong and full and exclusive that all other emotions save the joy of the eye in seeing, and of the ear in hearing, seemed dull and irrelevant. The mere joy of seeing contained all things in itself, without the tedious glosses supplied by comparison and thought. Like the religious enthusiasts of the East, Wordsworth sought in fixed and passionate contemplation for admission to the heart of things. And this method of intuition, which became habitual to him in the prime of life, took its origin in the self-sufficient vitality of his youthful senses and perceptions : I roamed from hill to hill, from rock to rock, To lay the inner faculties asleep. Nature herself as he remarks in a passage which breaks off suddenly in the midst of a metaphysical argument - Nature herself employs means to thwart this tyranny of the several senses by setting each of them to counteract the other, and by subduing each, in its highest developments, to the powers of the will and the intellect. His thraldom to the objects of sight, though it seemed to spring from causes "inherent in the creature," is lamented by Wordsworth as an intoxication, an excess incident to youth. Women, he says, escape it; with them the heart governs the eye, not the eye the heart; and he tells of one whom he knew (his sister Dorothy, no doubt), how Wise as women are When genial circumstance hath favoured them, She welcomed what was given, and craved no more. The same difference of character in the sexes is noted by Chaucer in his tale of the Princess Canace She was ful mesurable, as wommen be; and when the revellers were preparing to turn night into day, she thought of the necessities of the morrow, and took leave of her father to go to rest. But this measurable disposition, though it is the soul of wisdom and sanity, is not the begetter of poetry. If Wordsworth's transports of affection for the sights and sounds of Nature were, as he says, not profound, they were strong enough to survive the clash with thought, and to take on new life in more fruitful and enduring forms. So far as the tale of his early converse with Nature can be disengaged from the reflection and argument in which he swathes it, the impression it makes is the same throughout. It is a tale of a smothered fire, of fierce loves and wild feasts of the senses celebrated in solitude, of superstitious fears, and of joy so jealous of control that it shuns all contact with thought. But the malady of thought is an inevitable malady, and there is no good immunity from it to be had by shunning the infection. The escape from it is only for those whose system it has permeated; they alone may dare to hold it cheap. When Wordsworth depreciates the ardours and passions of his youth, it is because, looking back on them, he sees the peril of the course they have yet to run, and vainly dreams of precautions that might be taken to save them from the long disease that lies in wait for them. But this is to wish them weaker, and it was by their strength that they survived. When he became an apostle, with the joy of life for his gospel, the experiences of his early unthinking days gave him matter for his most moving and heart-felt discourses. An earlier ordination would have robbed him of half his message. |
