sciousness of his own maturity, and larger | motive that sustained the war was a stern sense of duty; the highest and best state of moral feeling to which the most nobleminded among Englishmen could attain except in rare moments of exaltation. was "a deliberate and preparatory fortitude, a sedate and stern melancholy, which had no sunshine, and was exhilarated only by the lightnings of indignation." But the rising of the Spaniards as a nation seemed of a sudden to change the entire face of things. Out of the depth of disappointment and the sense of frustration which followed, Wordsworth thus, in memorable words, describes the change which was effected: — force of intellect and of feeling- all these conjoined to lift the whole being of the poet into a nobler mood than it had yet attained. From 1802 to 1815 the shocks of great events followed one another rapidly, and kept aglow Wordsworth's heart and imagination. In the summer of 1802, | upon a July morning, before London was awake, Wordsworth left the great city, and from the roof of the Dover coach looked at the gliding river and the sleeping houses as he passed on his way to the Continent. During the brief peace he had an opportunity of contrasting the condition of France under the Consulate, when Calais looked sombre upon BuonaBut from the moment of the rising of the parte's birthday, with her state in the people of the Pyrenean peninsula, there was prouder season of his youth, when the a mighty change; we were instantaneously very "senselessness of joy" was sublime. animated; and, from that moment, the contest The calm which followed the Peace of assumed the dignity, which it is not in the Amiens was the thunderous calm that power of anything but hope to bestow; and, if goes before a storm. In the autumn I may dare to transfer language, prompted by months the strength of Wordsworth's a revelation of the state of being that admits soul lay couchant and brooding; his not of decay or change, to the concerns and spirit was gathering up its forces; when interests of our transitory planet, from that his eye turned outward, he saw little at tion, and this mortal put on immortality." "this corruptible put on incorrupthat moment in which to rejoice; the pet- This sudden elevation was on no account more tiness of life, alike though not equally in welcome, was by nothing more endeared than England and in France, the absence of by the returning sense which accompanied it high aims, heroic manners, and far-search- of inward liberty and choice, which gratified ing ideas, oppressed him. Yet he did not our moral yearnings, inasmuch as it would really despond; within him lay a forefeel- give henceforward to our actions as a people, ing of the great destiny which was due to an origination and direction unquestionably his nation. He sank inwards from thought moral-as it was free -as it was manifestly to thought, with no sadness in the nerves, therefore of fluctuations of generous feeling, in sympathy with the species-as it admitted no disposition to tears, no unconquerable of approbation and of complacency. We were sighs, yet with a melancholy in the soul, a intellectualized also in proportion; we looked steady remonstrance, and a high resolve.* backward upon the records of the human race The declaration of war, and the threat- with pride, and instead of being afraid, we ened invasion of 1803, roused him to a delighted to look forward into futurity. It spirit of more active patriotism: — was imagined that this new-born spirit of resistance, rising from the most sacred feelings of the human heart, would diffuse itself through many countries; and not merely for the distant future, but for the present, hopes were entertained as bold as they were disinterested and generous. No parleying now! in Britain is one breath. Three years later the conquest of north Germany, that deadly blow which left England to maintain the struggle almost or altogether single-handed, only exalted Wordsworth's spirit of resolution: 'Tis well from this day forward we shall know That in ourselves our safety must be sought. In 1803 the treacherous policy of Napoleon consummated itself when Ferdinand was forced to resign the crown of Spain, and the French troops entered Madrid to proclaim Joseph Buonaparte a king. Until this moment the dominant I apply to Wordsworth at this time words which he used in another connection. -"Advice to the Young," Prose Works, vol. i. pp. 319, 320. moment The pamphlet on the Convention of Cintra is Wordsworth's loftiest, most passionate, most prophet-like utterance as a prose-writer. Although an occasional piece, its interest and importance are of an enduring kind. It may be classed in the small group of writings dealing with occasional incidents and events in their relation to what is everlasting and universal, at the head of which stands Milton's prophetic pamphlet, the sublime "Areopagitica." Wordsworth's "Convention of Cintra" takes a place in this group not far below the speech of Milton; and zen Wordsworth's pamphlet is depressed to that position chiefly because, in its discussion of the details of the French surrender, is retained a larger quantity of the perishable matter of history. Considering the event from a military point of view, we can hardly be warranted in doubting that the decision of Sir Arthur Wellesley, confirmed and justified as it is by the great military historian of the Peninsular War, was a sound and prudent decision. Wordsworth, however, wrote neither as a soldier nor as a mere politician, but with "the antipathies and sympathies, the loves and hatreds of a citiof a human being." The military profession cultivates an almost exclusive attention to the external, the material and mechanical side of public events, and a disregard of moral interests, a faintness of sympathy with the best feelings, a dimness of apprehension of the chief truths relating to the happiness and dignity of man in society. The practical statesman, skilled in seeing into the mctives and managing the selfish passions of his followers, acquires "a promptness in looking through the most superficial part of the characters of those men, and this he mistakes for a knowledge of human kind." Of the wisdom which includes a recognition of the deeper emotions, the instincts and ardours of a people, the energy to dare and to achieve at times almost miraculously brought into beingthe delicacy of moral honour-in a word, of all that is, as it were, the higher function of the living body of society-men of routine, who manage the machine of the State, are either unaware or contemptuously sceptical. Wordsworth's school of political wisdom did not lie amid a host of petty and conflicting self-interests, nor among factions which force men astray against their will: Not there; but in dark wood, and rocky cave, Among such enduring, free, and passionate presences of nature there were seclusion and a refuge from motives of petty expediency, and arguments of formal, professional pedantry. Here Wordsworth could look into the life of things; here he could submit himself to the vast impalpable motives of justice, and of the deep fraternity of nations; he could pursue those trains of reasoning which originate from, and are addressed to, the uni versal spirit of man. His purpose was not merely, with the energy of a widelyranging intellect, to use truth as a powerful tool in the hand, but "to infuse truth as a vital fluid in the heart." It was not knowledge merely which he wished to convey, but knowledge animated by the breath and life of appropriate feeling; it was not wisdom alone as a possession, but wisdom as a power. Whether men would listen to him or not, did not in the first instance concern Wordsworth. When the singing-robe or the prophetic mantle is on, a man does not peer about anxiously for auditors. The writer felt that he had a work to do, and he was straitened until that work should be accomplished; he uttered his prophecy as the night-wind sings to men who sleep, or revel, or toil at the ledger, and do not hear; only one and an other wakeful and apprehensive may attend to the dirge or the promise as it passes by; he that hath ears to hear, let him hear. Wordsworth's style in this pamphlet is singularly living and organic. With the mechanism of sentence-constructing he did not ever trouble himself to make acquaintance, although he had a full sense of the importance of right workmanship in verse. Each sentence here lives and grows before the reader; its development is like a vital process of nature, and the force from which it originates is not speedily expended. "Language," Wordsworth has said elsewhere, "if it do not uphold, and feed, and leave in quiet, like the power of gravitation, or the air we breathe, is a counter-spirit unremittingly and noiselessly at work, to subvert, to lay waste, to vitiate, and to dissolve." Here the thought and feeling are not crystallike with sharp, clear edges; rather they saturate the language which sustains them as a solvent, and which conveys them to us in such a way that they at once enter into the vital action of the mind. Passages of close inquiry into facts occur, but these are the least permanently interesting portions of the pamphlet. At times the progress of ideas seems to be slow, and the passion studiously deliberate; but the sweep of mind is wide and comprehensive, and the motion seems slow partly because it is high up, and uninterrupted by the recurring incidents which mark and measure the advance of thought or feeling upon a lower level; justice and indignation, sorrow and hope, bear the thought which soars through large spaces of the sky; the motion, when it seems least rapid, is like that of a broad-winged bird which sails far aloft, and only at long intervals utters a cry. It is not necessary to retrace the arguments by which Wordsworth attempts to justify the popular indignation against the Convention and its authors. Whether a defeated French army should have been permitted to depart to France with its arms, its baggage, and its plunder, or not, is a question which we can be content to leave unanswered. What loses nothing of its importance and power is the noble conception of national well-being which this pamphlet displays, its comprehension of the spiritual life of a people, its recognition of the superior might of moral over material forces, its lofty and masculine devotion to justice, its sympathy, deep, tender, and empassioned, with the varying moods of hope, resolution, fortitude, rage, despair, of an afflicted land. One or two passages may be selected from the pamphlet, but the whole has an organic unity, and any passage severed from the rest, and thrust forward as a specimen, seems in a measure denaturalized, and deprived of its vital function. closely to the present and to the past, that is to the self which is or has been. Whereas the vigour of the human soul is from without and from futurity, in breaking down limit, and losing and forgetting herself in the sensation and image of country and of the human race; and when she returns and is most restricted and confined, her dignity consists in the contemplation of a better and more exalted being, which, though proceeding from herself, she loves and is devoted to as to another. Vox Populi. For, when the people speaks loudly, it is from being strongly possessed either by the Godhead or the Demon; and he, who cannot discover the true spirit from the false, hath no ear for profitable communion. But in all that regarded the destinies of Spain, voice of Britain had the unquestionable sound and her own as connected with them, the of inspiration. If the gentle passions of pity, love, and gratitude be porches of the temple; if the sentiments of admiration and rivalry be pillars upon which the structure is sustained; if, lastly, hatred and anger and vengeance, be steps, which, by a mystery of nature, lead to the House of Sanctity; then it was manifest and that the voice within was of holiness and to what power the edifice was consecrated; truth. Arts of Peace under a Despotism. - Now commerce, manufactures, agriculture, and all the peaceful arts, are of the nature of virtues or intellectual powers: they cannot be given; they cannot be stuck in here and there; they must spring up; they must grow of themselves; they may be encouraged; they thrive better with encouragement and delight in it; but the obligation must have bounds nicely defined; for they are delicate, proud, and independent. But a tyrant has no joy in anything which is endued with such excellence; he sickens at the sight of it; he turns away from it as an insult to his own attributes. Riddance of the French not the object of the war. From these impulses, then, our brethren of the peninsula had risen; they could have risen from no other. By these energies, and by such others as (under judicious encouragement) would naturally grow out of and unite with these, the multitudes, who have risen, stand; and if they desert them, must fall. Riddance, mere riddance- safety, mere safety, are objects far too defined, too inert and passive in their own nature to have ability either to rouse or to sustain. They win not the mind by any attraction of grandeur or sublime delight, either in effort or in endurance; for the mind gains consciousness of its strength to undergo only by exercise among materials which admit the impression of its power; which grow under it, which bend under it, which resist, which change under its influence, which alter either through its might or in its presence by it or before it. These, during times of tranquillity, are the objects with which, in the studious walks of seques-point of vision of our own. After the tered life, genius most loves to hold intercourse; by which it is reared and supported; these are the qualities in action and in object, in image, in thought, and in feeling, from communion with which proceeds originally all that is creative in art or science, and all that is magnanimous in virtue. Despair thinks of safety, and hath no purpose; fear thinks of safety, despondency looks the same way; but these passions are far too selfish, and therefore too blind, to reach the thing at which they aim, even when there is in them sufficient dignity to have an aim. All courage is a projection from ourselves; however short-lived, it is a motion of hope. But these thoughts bind too Wordsworth's political writings, subsequent to the year 1815, are of inferior interest. A part of their effect is that of enabling us to stand away from Wordsworth, clear of his shadow, that we may receive his influence at an independent peace and the restoration of Louis XVIII., came the dreary age of politics, the time of the Holy Alliance and the regency. Wordsworth's nature, which had been kept fervent by the impression of great events during the war with France, now inevitably in a certain measure cooled, and hardened as it cooled. It has been shown that his position as teacher of new spiritual truths condemned him to hostility towards the ideas inherited from the eighteenth century, among which may be found the chief factors of modern politics, as far as 66 The long of the house of Lowther. modern politics are other than stationary or retrogressive. Wordsworth's patriotic enthusiasm on behalf of England, and the English nation and polity, as soon as the ardour kindled and kept alive by the struggle with France had died out, left behind it in his nature a certain deposit of the grey ash of English conservatism. And a plea in favour of Wordsworth's conservatism, as that of a maintainer of things spiritual against the grosser interests of life, may be urged if we consider some of the hard and coarse aspects of the Whiggism of his time, if we reflect upon the exaggerated estimates formed of salvation by useful knowledge," the pushing upward by strength and shift of the middle class for ascendancy, the apparent substitution in politics of interests in place of ideas, the general devotion to material comfort, the pride in mechanic arts, the hard and shallow criticism of literature uttered by the chief organ of Whiggism. We have conspicuous instances in our own day of chivalrous and ardent natures, which, being bewildered by the yet unor ganized civilization of a democratic period, for want of the patience of faith and hope, the enduringness of nerve needed for sane and continuous action, fling themselves into a worship blind to its vaster selfish-curés, who were pining in villages unobness and materialisms, or waste their chivalry in schemes for the sudden attainment of a miniature Utopia. Such was not Wordsworth's case. It needs less of insight and imaginative ardour to discover the elements of noble spiritual life in the democracy than in the bourgeoisie. Henry Crabb Robinson has recorded that he once heard Wordsworth say, half in joke, half in earnest, "I have no respect whatever for Whigs, but I have a great deal of the Chartist in me." This is literally true. Wordsworth could at no time have become a Whig politician, whose creed must be written in useful prose, not in harmonious song; but had the period of Wordsworth's youth, when a spring-like courage and animation flooded his being, fallen in with the days of the Chartist movement, one can hardly doubt that he would have conceived it to be his special mission to organize the aspirations of the working classes around great ideas, and thus to spiritualize the democracy. The descent from the pamphlet on the Convention of Cintra, to the "Two Addresses to the Freeholders of Westmoreland" (1818), is steep and sudden. The addresses were written to oppose the candidature of Brougham, and aid in securing the return to Parliament of a member served by Courts," In 1818 he wrote, "Places, Pensions, and formidable things, if you like! but far better these, with our King and Constitution, with our quiet firesides and flourishing fields, than proscription and confiscation without them!" Wordsworth had indeed lost courage, as he confesses, when, in the prospect of each possible change, visions of proscription and confiscation rose before him. The axioms of faith, of hope, of sacred daring, had been recurred to in his earlier writings, and formed the points of depar ture in his trains of impassioned reasoning; now their place is taken by axioms of prudence, of caution, of distrust. In Wordsworth's new creed there was much that was noble, for, like Burke, he was always an extraordinary, not an ordinary conservative in politics; but one thing that creed necessarily wanted-the power of impulsion, the power of initiating and supporting a steadfast and generous advance. And, as might be anticipated, from this period onward a decline is observable also in the poetry of Wordsworth. He did not now ever enter into novel states of feeling; he was not precisely exhausting an earlier accumulation of power, but he was with feebler energy and insight repeating processes which had From Macmillan's Magazine. THE CURATE IN CHARGE. CHAPTER XVI. at one time been so admirably productive. According to the Wordsworthian method in poetry, a certain emanation, partly given by the object, partly by the poet's mind, a tertium quid which is neither mind nor CICELY wrote her letter to her aunt that object, but an aspect or an influence par- evening, dropping some tears over it when taking of both, becomes the subject of Mab was not by to see; and almost as song. Wordsworth had now acquired a soon as it was possible she had a very power of applying this method at will to kind answer, granting her request, and any topic, and the application of this con- more. Aunt Jane declared that she would templative method had grown into a habit, receive Mab with great delight, and do only at irregular times inspired by new everything that could be done to further and vivid emotion, or fed by a fresh, quick her art-studies, which, as the British Muoutwelling of thought. Thus one is com- seum was near, and "a very good artist" pelled to state the main fact. But it is lived next door to Miss Maydew, seemed also true that in Wordsworth's poetry his likely to be something worth while. earlier self, though encumbered by the "She shall be to me like my own child; growth of his later personality, was not though I have never concealed from either extinct. To one who does not wholly fail of you that you, Cicely, are my pet," wrote in sympathy with Wordsworth's genius, Miss Maydew; and she added a still more while the fading of spiritual light from his liberal invitation. “If you want to spend poetry is manifest, a mild and equable a few days anywhere between leaving splendour remains as in the western sky Brentburn and going to the new place, at sunset; places still alive and instinct wherever that may be, you must come with intense glory may be discerned, and here-babies and all. I can manage to there are mysterious flushings and bright-find beds for you near; and it will be a enings at times; therefore we are unable to withdraw our eyes, though momently we may note how quiescence comes, and the repose which will be long. nice little holiday for us all," said the kind woman. She even added a postscript, to the effect that, if there was a little money wanting at the time of the removal, Cicely With those who hold Wordsworth's in- was "not to hesitate" to apply to her: fluence to be a beneficent influence, it is a and what could woman do more? Symmanifest duty to diminish in no degree pathy and hospitality, and a little money, the impression which he is capable of "if wanted." Alas! perhaps it is bemaking upon the mind of the present cause the money is so sure to be wanted time. We are grateful for this gift of his that so few people venture on such an complete prose works. We cannot but offer; but Miss Maydew knew she was express surprise that the English people safe with Hester's child, who was so like does not yet possess a complete collection her mother. Cicely's other letter was sucof his poems. We take the present pub-cessful, too. The lawyer who represented lication as a pledge that now at length we the Chester family was quite willing to shall be put in possession of that portion postpone the sale until Mr. St. John's of Wordsworth's poetry-of importance time was up. After all, the world is not in connection with "The Prelude" and so very bad as it is called. Nobody was "The Excursion"—which is known to ex- cruel to the St. Johns. The tradespeople ist in manuscript. And to this should be agreed to wait for their money. The added, in compliance with a wish long entertained, and formally expressed by the with reference to Mr. Browning's poem "The Lost poet, the Continental journals of his wife sion of the prose works gives a portrait of Words Leader." (Preface, p. xxxvii.) The private impres and sister. The warm welcome accorded worth from a crayon drawing by Nash, made for to Dorothy Wordsworth's journal in Scot- Southey. I suppose it to be a faithful record of the prosaic aspect of Wordsworth's face, and, as such, of land is evidence that the present moment decided value. It were well if this portrait superseded, is a ripe and suitable one for such a pub-in editions of Wordsworth's poems, the maudiin Picklication.* EDWARD DOWDEN. ersgill likeness, the original of which is at St. John's College, Cambridge. The portrait by HaydonWordsworth standing on Helvellyn -from which the head was engraved by Lupton, is stated by a competent authority, the Rev. R. P. Graves, to be the true portrait of Wordsworth in his mood of inspiration. "Noth The present publication includes one short poem by Wordsworth hitherto unprinted, -some verses inscribed in a copy of his poems presented to the queening," he writes, "can be truer to the original than the in 1846. It breathes the spirit of old age, and, without any distinctive power as poetry, possesses a certain pathetic interest. In connection with the subject of this article, and the charges of renegade and apostate brought against Wordsworth, the reader may be directed to a letter from Mr. Robert Browning to the editor droop of the head weighed down by the thoughts and feelings over which the active imagination is pleasurably brooding." The portraits by Haydon and by Nash appear to me to be not opposed, but complementary. On the subject of portraits see the lecture on Wordsworth by Mr. Graves in "Afternoon Lectures" (1869). |