Around me from among the hazel leaves, Now here, now there, moved by the straggling wind, I turned my head to look if he were there; With the soul's subordination of powers like thesepervasive yet only half-conscious-Wordsworth was constantly dealing, but with the passion of love, which is sufficiently strong and self-conscious to require a degree of warmth in treatment that could hardly be approved by his principles, and which is likely to invade the power of self-control, he refused to deal directly. Though he acknowledged that Love, blessed Love, is everywhere yet he preferred to keep so far from the borderline of conflict between passionate love and self-control that he would always be absolutely sure of the supremacy of the latter. But he who would aspire to fathom the depth of the human soul and at the same time remain humanhearted, must also be willing to sound its tumult. Wordsworth, however, consistently refused to do the latter, which resulted not only in a distinct loss of humanheartedness, but also in the gain of a certain conscious self-mastery which is at once the source of both his weakness and his strength. A precaution must be thrown out at this point. It is not here intended to convey the idea that Wordsworth's best and most characteristic poems were the product 10 The Poet and the Caged Turtledove." wholly of self-directed effort and the "conscious conquests of insight." There is at bottom no contradiction in saying that there is volition and self-government in every line of his poetry and that at the same time nature not only gave him the matter of his best poems but also wrote his poems for him. For it may be conceived that a richly endowed mind may have a great variety of instinctive and spontaneous qualities and still possess a more than usual amount of self-consciousness and self-government. Self-possession and spontaneity are not mutually exclusive, but may both abound in a genius of a volitional type. This seems to be the truth in the case of Wordsworth. His strength, from this point of view, lies in the happy co-operation, at rare moments, of self-possession and spontaneity. This co-operation is so difficult to attain that we should not expect Wordsworth to attain to it always, but to fail at times, as indeed he does, on the side of spontaneity. How these unconscious and spontaneous elements are wrought into artistic structures we may never know from the very fact that they are unconscious and spontaneous. In his prefaces to his poems Wordsworth does not make enough allowance for the part they actually play in the makng of his poetry. But in those same prefaces, on the other hand, he gives the most accurate and profound description of what took place consciously in his own mind, and in so far the prefaces are invaluable, not only as a criticism of the conscious side of his art, but as giving us excellent insights into his character. By the strenuous exercise of the power of passion and will Wordsworth developed an unusually strong spirit of personal liberty and acquired a complete mastery of his senses. When, in his mature years, he looked back over the passionate life of his childhood, he felt that he had lived too much the life of the senses. He says in the "Prelude:" I speak in recollection of a time When the bodily eye, in every stage of life Such strength in me as often held my mind He very kindly and genially ascribes his mind's redemption from this thralldom to the powers of nature, and suggests that if he cared to enter upon abstruser argument, he could "unfold the means which nature studiously employs to thwart this tyranny." Whatever the agency by which this tyranny was thwarted, it is quite certain that by the time he was writing the "Prelude" his own mind had become a safe-guard against any such tyranny, and that too, without the agency of natural forces. Just as he resisted the power of passionate love to master his will, so he carefully guarded against the despotism of the senses and even looked back with a jealous eye upon their despotism in his childhood. He had now shaken off the domineering habit of the senses: I had known Too forcibly, too early in my life, For this to last: I shook the habit off In Nature's presence stood, as now I stand, A sensitive being, a creative soul.1 And he had now become the example of his own text: Man, if he do but live within the light Of high endeavours, daily spreads abroad His being armed with strength that cannot fail." "Prelude," Bk. XII. 1Prelude," Bk. XII. "Prelude," Bk. IV. With a mind that was sensitive and creative and that constantly lived in the light of high endeavors, Wordsworth had attained a high vantage ground from which to explore nature and human life. He was like a man on a high eminence over-looking a broad expanse of country. The slightest change of position presents views of objects remote from each other and varied in kind and nature. He was like the Solitary of his own "Excursion," who in the wilds of America, Having gained the top Of some commanding eminence, which yet With mind that sheds a light on what he sees; Pouring above his head its radiance down And thus, with a mind that shed light on what it saw and that was as free as the sun and oftentimes as lonely as the sun, Wordsworth had attained to a perfect self-mastery and to a large and glorious freedom. We have now seen that the spirit of the times was revolutionary and that men attempted to readjust society on a higher level and sought greater personal liberty. We have also seen that Wordsworth possessed the powers of passion with extreme sensitiveness, and volition with a moral predisposition, and that by the exercise of these powers in a time of revolution and of liberty-seeking he attained to an excellent self-mastery and a glorious personal freedom. "Excursion," Bk. III. CHAPTER II WORDSWORTH: MEMORY AND WILL. I. Wordsworth's theory of freedom accords with his strong sense of personal freedom in actual experience, which we have just described. As early as his first college vacation he had learned that the immortal soul has the God-like power to inform, to create, and to mould her environment: I had inward hopes And swellings of the spirit, was rapt and soothed, Informs, creates, and thaws the deepest sleep He had also made careful observation of Those passages of life that give Profoundest knowledge to what point, and how, The mind is lord and master-outward sense The obedient servant of her will." And at a much later time, when writing the "Excursion,” he observed that ""Prelude," Bk. IV. "Prelude," Bk. XII. |