whatever outward expressions and connections it may have. Wordsworth, says Emerson, "alone in his time, treated the human mind well, and with an absolute trust." And it was a trust in the mind's power of self-direction and self-support,-its power of will. We have already seen that in the production of poetry the will has two functions to fulfill-to reproduce by a species of reactions a former emotion and to hold under restraint the new emotion. In the process of life the will has still greater functions to fulfill. First of all by the doctrine of recollection, it is to conserve and transmute all that is valuable of former experiences. Secondly, it is to hold the eyes and ears, heart and mind, close to the bosom of mother earth:

Long have I loved what I behold,

The night that calms, the day that cheers;
The common growth of mother earth

Suffices me-her tears, her mirth,

Her humblest mirth and tears.15

And thirdly, the heart must "watch and receive." Man is to "live within the light of high endeavors," and when he does so, he "daily spreads abroad his being armed with strength that can not fail."

But when the will does its work intensely and passionately, then, by the stress of feeling, the experience is carried along through the different mystic stages, and it becomes more and more subjective and intuitive, more and more inexplicable. And, like chemicals that will act and form new combinations after a certain intensity of heat has been reached, so the will and the passions, counteracting and re-enforcing each other, both strongly and highly wrought, beat out new combinations of high char

45Peter Bell."

acter. This is the ground work of Wordsworth's mystical synthesis, and it is solid ground work-as solid and enduring as the heart of man itself. Born of a time of revolution which stirred the vital energies and deepest personal convictions of men, it yet bears the stamp of an original and masterful mind. It is a truth arrived at not by the calculating and analytical methods of a philosopher, but by the demands of an intuitive and sensitive nature charged with volitional and moral earnestness. It is no doubt wrong to call this a system of philosophyit is rather a method of practice in the fundamental terms of human life. It is when Wordsworth is dealing with this original stuff of human nature that he rises above the accidental influences of his times and identifies himself powerfully with those forces in men that are permanent and enduring,

Their passions and their feelings, chiefly those
Essential and eternal in the heart.18

It is here that he penetrates deepest into the heart of man and farthest into the mysteries of eternal being, and produces in the mind the most intimate sense of moral and spiritual freedom. It is here too that his utterances, in the words of Lowell, "have the bare sincerity, the absolute abstraction from time and place, the immunity from decay, that belong to the grand simplicities of the Bible."17

CHAPTER IV

WORDSWORTH: ART AND FREEDOM.

Wordsworth always and primarily had before him the purpose of writing poetry about man, nature, and childhood, however completely that purpose may have been obscured at times by social, political, or metaphysical interests. The poetry, to be sure, was to be philosophical poetry. It was to deal with new and original kinds of matter. It was to reform the tastes of readers and was to create a special taste for itself. It was to be an enduring kind of poetry and was to teach mankind enduring lessons. And, with these distracting interests, the only reason it proved to be genuine poetry is that Wordsworth was at bottom a genuine artist. We have seen that he, for the most part, renounced the purely mystical, that he dispensed with the pleasure of building charming abstractions through the concrete images of the outer world, and with seeing "into the life of things." We shall now see that he renounced the pleasure of the pure mystic because of artistic purposes, because his deepest impulse of life was the artistic impulse. "Faith," says E. Recejac, “identifies mind with its object in a way that artistic reflection can never do. When we reflect we find that we get the feeling of love, joy, being, from within, and then we picture them as belonging to all sorts of things: but in the mystic state, the consciousness and

the world meet directly in a world that transcends them both-in God who at once contains them and carries the sense of their affinities to the highest point. It is this meeting of the inner life of the spirit and the outer life which leaves behind every aesthetic effect." In the purely mystic consciousness, then, the inner and outer life meet in such close affinity that the artist, who must work in concrete imagery, pictures, colors, etc., in order to be effective, cannot find expression for the purely mystical experience. The pure mystic may indeed be able to "see into the life of things," as he says, but it does not help the artist, for he has no way of representing what he sees, and, as has just been said, representation is essential to the artist.

Wordsworth, then, gave up for the most part the mighty charm of abstraction because he chose to be a poet primarily and not a mystic. But for this very same reason, namely, that he chose to be a poet, Wordsworth carried the mystic experience, by the intensity of will and passion, to as near the vanishing point of the senses as possible. Volition and high passion are not only the means by which character is beaten into shape, but they are essential to the production of great and enduring poetry. And in the last analysis it will be seen that, for Wordsworth, the chief function of childhood memories, sense perceptions, and the moral idea taken together, is to furnish material for purely artistic purposes.

Poetry may deal with common things and the common affairs of life, but it must deal with them more intensely than their commonness would suggest. Shakespeare, to use a familiar example, could deal with the common affairs of English life, but his great characters

1

"The Bases of the Mystic Consciousness."

are filled with the mystery of power and with the inten sity of high passion. Macbeth feels his heart knocking at his ribs and clutches at air-drawn daggers in his delirium. Othello is wrought upon by green-eyed jealousy until he is thrown into a trance. Hamlet is familiar with states of rapturous ecstacy. Lear, driven into the storm by the heinous wickedness of his daughters, is stirred to mountain peaks of passion. We do not call these experiences mystical because so many other elementselements of mind derangement, which is permissible in drama, elements of acting and dramatic effects, etc.,—enter into them. But they have essentially the same source with the mystical experiences. Wordsworth believed the truth could be found in the commonest things right before one's eyes. But the penetration, the vision necessary to discover the truth there really created new values for them. Wordsworth wrote poems about common objects, but the poems do not especially have the element of commonness in them. His poems about children are not for children; they are for mature minds. His poems about peasants are not to be fully appreciated by peasants. The intensity of treatment removes the poems a great distance from the objects treated.

Again this intensity of treatment gave little chance for ornamental display. It made the language of his poetry as simple as that of common people. Wordsworth found when the holy passion was stirring that simple language would best express his feelings, just as Lady Macbeth, in the night walk scene, when she was charged with the greatest possible intensity, found (that is, the poet found for her,) simple language best suited to her purpose. To produce the greatest poetry, then, with common subjects, the poet must use power and intensity, and must express himself in the simplest language.