Mr Harper has done. His book is far fuller of politics than of poetry; and it is not, and never will be, of politics that wise men will chiefly think when they hear the name of Wordsworth. Yet Wordsworth disputes with Shakespeare and Milton the glory of being the greatest political name in the long line of our poets. There is, perhaps, in Shelley a finer purity of political passion than in any of the three; but Shelley's vision was set on changeless ideas and abstractions and not on those temporary, local, partial and changing embodiments of ideas which are the stuff of politics. The real Europe, the real Greece, Rome, England he could not see, as those others, and notably Wordsworth, could and did. Wordsworth went through a period when, as we have seen, under the influence of the French Revolution he approached politics from this side of abstractions. And it is this moment in his life on which Mr Harper lays all his stress. But what is notable about it is that it produced little or no great poetry dealing with political subjects. That came later, when he had seen the cause of Liberty embodied in the struggle of his own country against the lawless despotism of Napoleon. And, when we speak of him as a political poet, it is necessarily of this period that we chiefly think, because it and it alone produced great poetry. Yet of this poetry Mr Harper scarcely speaks at all. Eight or ten of his nine hundred pages are all that he gives to them. And these contain at least one strange impertinence: 'I attach only the smallest consequence,' says Mr Harper, speaking of 'The Happy Warrior,'' to the note appended to the poem in the edition of 1807 stating that the death of Lord Nelson "directed the Author's thoughts to the subject," even though it is supported by a long Fenwick Note to the same effect, and by a letter from Southey to Scott, dated February 4, 1806' (II, 119). Was there ever a more arrogant defiance of unpalatable truth? Mr Harper does not like war or its heroes; he does not wish to admit that Wordsworth paid honour to Nelson; and therefore neither the express, contemporary and public declaration of the poet himself, confirmed though it be by a note dictated in his old age, nor the equally contemporary evidence of a letter written by Southey to Scott, who, after all, were not only both Wordsworth's friends but poets both, is to be held of any consequence whatever when weighed in the balance against Mr Harper's prejudices! It may be as well that Mr Harper leaves this side of Wordsworth alone, for his total lack of sympathy with it would have made any chapter he might have written on it a predestined failure. Perhaps the war has opened his eyes, as it has opened the eyes of so many, to the sacred duty laid upon the free to repel the enemies of freedom with all their strength and at the cost, if need be, of their lives. But when he wrote this book he was perfectly blind to all that, and a bitter enemy of the mildest exhibitions of a warlike spirit. In October 1803, when an invasion was expected, Dorothy Wordsworth wrote to Mrs Clarkson that the poet had become a volunteer, and that 'surely there never was a more determined hater of the French, nor one more willing to do his utmost to destroy them if they really do come.' Most lovers of Wordsworth will be proud both of the act and of the feeling which inspired it. But Mr Harper considers it 'odious to see him in a bloodthirsty mood!' The truth is that Mr Harper, at least when he has a pèn in his hand, is a Godwinian rationalist to whom emotion is anathema, to whom any one man is as important as another, for whom 'social virtue consists, not in the love of this or the other individual, but in the love of man.' Wordsworth, on the other hand, was a complete human being, feeling as well as thinking, willingly yielding to local and personal attachments, and making no pretence that his brother was not more to him than another man, or England than France. He said some of the hardest words that have ever been said of England, and he could even rejoice in her defeat when he believed her to be fighting in an unholy cause. But his joy was never that of the abstract and cosmopolitan rationalist. It was a joy mixed with an agony of pain; the joy of a man who goes to the scaffold for his country, or, more nearly, of one who changes his faith, knowing that in doing so he stabs the mother whom he loves to the heart. The misery that Wordsworth suffered between 1793 and 1795 or 1796 was that of a tragic struggle between his heart and his mind. For the moment, the thoughts mastered the feelings; and with silent despair in his heart he tried to live in the belief that an abstract liberty, equality and fraternity could take for men the place of the old humanities of father, son and brother, friend and lover and fellow-countryman. As he himself tells us in 'The Prelude,' he 'Zealously laboured to cut off [his] heart From all the sources of her former strength;' he believed and hoped that 'future times would surely see The man to come parted, as by a gulph, That is, at the bidding, as he says, of 'syllogistic words' he gave up all hold on reality and in particular on the two ideas of continuity and locality or nationality which are the very foundation of the art of politics. The heart of man will not endure to be cut off from all the sources of her strength'; if it is so cut off, it dies. So Wordsworth found, as he tossed in a sea of insoluble questions, from which he was only rescued, first by devoting his faculty of pure reasoning to its proper sphere-that world of abstract science where 'disturbances of human will and power. . . find no admission'-and then by listening to old influences that had moved his heart from childhood, and above all to his sister Dorothy and to Nature, who led him back 'To those sweet counsels between head and heart' from which alone grows 'genuine knowledge fraught with peace. The story has often been told, never so well, after the poet's own account, as by M. Legouis in his admirable 'Jeunesse de Wordsworth.' There is nothing better in his book than the chapter in which he shows the progress of Wordsworth's deliverance from Godwin's intellectual abstractions, according to which it was absurd to pretend that an honest ploughman' could be 'as virtuous as Cato.' Abstract man gradually faded from the poet's mind; and man as he is attracted his interest instead. And, as he closely watched the poor about him and saw how much inherited customs and memories and affections meant to them, he gradually restored to the real man, as M. Legouis says, 'one by one, the feelings of which ideal man had been stripped by Godwin.' And so, mind and heart consenting together, great poetry came from him. But not yet great political poetry. For in that field mind and heart did not yet consent together. So long as the mind judged that France was fighting for, and England against, the cause of liberty and justice, while the heart remained as intensely English as it always was from his first day to his last, great poetry, which demands the union of mind and heart, could not come from Wordsworth. The change began to come in 1798, when the French first attacked Switzerland. The next year Napoleon became First Consul. But it was not till 1802 that the great political poetry began. In that year Napoleon became First Consul for life; and France openly ceased to be a free country. In that year Napoleon sent Ney into Switzerland and assumed the attitude of a lord paramount of that country, which was to lead to graver interferences later on. In that year also Wordsworth renewed his interest in politics by visiting France during the peace. When he landed at Calais, he wrote the Sonnet Fair Star of Evening,' with which Mr Acland opens his useful and excellently edited little volume of Patriotic Poems. The poet looked across to England: There! that dusky spot Beneath thee, that is England; there she lies. While there, he denounced the crowd of English whom he saw hurrying 'to bend the knee In France, before the new-born Majesty,' and declared that 'truth,' 'sense' and 'liberty' were flown from the new France. A week or two later he was at Dover again. His heart beat high at all he saw; for all was England and all was free. The two loves were now one. 'Here, on our native soil, we breathe once more. Europe is yet in bonds; but let that pass, The unity of mind and heart was attained, the choice taken; and now the political poetry could begin. A few weeks ago, at a conference of the English Association, a bookseller was telling his audience that one of the effects of the war was an increased sale of poetry and especially of the poetry of Wordsworth. There can be no doubt, as indeed he said, that this is partly due to Mr Acland's little book, with its interesting introduction and the excellent historical notes which face the poems on the opposite pages, an arrangement as convenient and pleasant as it is original. But it must also be due to the peculiar nature of Wordsworth's patriotic poetry. It is not too much to say that it reads as if it were written for us to-day. Splendid as are Shakespeare's outbursts in Henry the Fifth' and 'King John,' we cannot quite feel that of them. The wars he had to deal with were mere duels of nations in which the interest we take is simply a pride in seeing the victory of our own. Except the fighting itself there is nothing great about them, no cause, no idea, nothing of the universal soul of man. But in this war-far more even than in the great struggle with Napoleon-everything great in life seems to be at stake. And it is natural, it is even inevitable that we should go back for comfort and courage in it to the poet who could not sound the trumpet till he could put his faith and vision into the blast it was to give-the poet who cried, as he looked on the narrow waters that lie between England and France: |