Appreciations, With An Essay on Style

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If the style be the man, in all the colour and intensity of a
veritable apprehension, it will be in a real sense "impersonal."

I said, thinking of books like Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, that
prose literature was the characteristic art of the nineteenth
century, as others, thinking of its triumphs since the youth of Bach,
have assigned that place to music. Music and prose literature are,
in one sense, the opposite terms of art; the art of literature
presenting to the imagination, through the intelligence, a range of
interests, as free and various as those which music presents to it
through sense. And certainly the tendency of what has been here said
is to bring literature too under those conditions, by conformity to
which music takes rank as the typically perfect art. If music be the
ideal of all art whatever, precisely because in music it is
impossible to distinguish the form from the substance or matter, the
subject from the expression, then, literature, by finding its
specific excellence in the absolute correspondence of the term to its
import, will be [38] but fulfilling the condition of all artistic
quality in things everywhere, of all good art.

Good art, but not necessarily great art; the distinction between
great art and good art depending immediately, as regards literature
at all events, not on its form, but on the matter. Thackeray's
Esmond, surely, is greater art than Vanity Fair, by the greater
dignity of its interests. It is on the quality of the matter it
informs or controls, its compass, its variety, its alliance to great
ends, or the depth of the note of revolt, or the largeness of hope in
it, that the greatness of literary art depends, as The Divine Comedy,
Paradise Lost, Les Miserables, The English Bible, are great art.
Given the conditions I have tried to explain as constituting good
art;--then, if it be devoted further to the increase of men's
happiness, to the redemption of the oppressed, or the enlargement of
our sympathies with each other, or to such presentment of new or old
truth about ourselves and our relation to the world as may ennoble
and fortify us in our sojourn here, or immediately, as with Dante, to
the glory of God, it will be also great art; if, over and above those
qualities I summed up as mind and soul--that colour and mystic
perfume, and that reasonable structure, it has something of the soul
of humanity in it, and finds its logical, its architectural place, in
the great structure of human life.

1888.

NOTES

12. *Mr. Saintsbury, in his Specimens of English Prose, from Malory
to Macaulay, has succeeded in tracing, through successive English
prose-writers, the tradition of that severer beauty in them, of which
this admirable scholar of our literature is known to be a lover.
English Prose, from Mandeville to Thackeray, more recently "chosen
and edited" by a younger scholar, Mr. Arthur Galton, of New College,
Oxford, a lover of our literature at once enthusiastic and discreet,
aims at a more various illustration of the eloquent powers of English
prose, and is a delightful companion.

28. +In the original, the quoted material is not indented but instead
appears in a smaller typeface; I have chosen to indent the material
half an inch to make it easier to read.

WORDSWORTH

[39] SOME English critics at the beginning of the present century had
a great deal to say concerning a distinction, of much importance, as
they thought, in the true estimate of poetry, between the Fancy, and
another more powerful faculty--the Imagination. This metaphysical
distinction, borrowed originally from the writings of German
philosophers, and perhaps not always clearly apprehended by those who
talked of it, involved a far deeper and more vital distinction, with
which indeed all true criticism more or less directly has to do, the
distinction, namely, between higher and lower degrees of intensity in
the poet's perception of his subject, and in his concentration of
himself upon his work. Of those who dwelt upon the metaphysical
distinction between the Fancy and the Imagination, it was Wordsworth
who made the most of it, assuming it as the basis for the final
classification of his poetical writings; and it is in these writings
that the deeper and more vital distinction, which, as I have said,
underlies the metaphysical [40] distinction, is most needed, and may
best be illustrated.

For nowhere is there so perplexed a mixture as in Wordsworth's own
poetry, of work touched with intense and individual power, with work
of almost no character at all. He has much conventional sentiment,
and some of that insincere poetic diction, against which his most
serious critical efforts were directed: the reaction in his political
ideas, consequent on the excesses of 1795, makes him, at times, a
mere declaimer on moral and social topics; and he seems, sometimes,
to force an unwilling pen, and write by rule. By making the most of
these blemishes it is possible to obscure the true aesthetic value of
his work, just as his life also, a life of much quiet delicacy and
independence, might easily be placed in a false focus, and made to
appear a somewhat tame theme in illustration of the more obvious
parochial virtues. And those who wish to understand his influence,
and experience his peculiar savour, must bear with patience the
presence of an alien element in Wordsworth's work, which never
coalesced with what is really delightful in it, nor underwent his
special power. Who that values his writings most has not felt the
intrusion there, from time to time, of something tedious and prosaic?
Of all poets equally great, he would gain most by a skilfully made
anthology. Such a selection would show, in truth, not so much what
he was, or to himself or others [41] seemed to be, as what, by the
more energetic and fertile quality in his writings, he was ever
tending to become. And the mixture in his work, as it actually
stands, is so perplexed, that one fears to miss the least promising
composition even, lest some precious morsel should be lying hidden
within--the few perfect lines, the phrase, the single word perhaps,
to which he often works up mechanically through a poem, almost the
whole of which may be tame enough. He who thought that in all
creative work the larger part was given passively, to the recipient
mind, who waited so dutifully upon the gift, to whom so large a
measure was sometimes given, had his times also of desertion and
relapse; and he has permitted the impress of these too to remain in
his work. And this duality there--the fitfulness with which the
higher qualities manifest themselves in it, gives the effect in his
poetry of a power not altogether his own, or under his control, which
comes and goes when it will, lifting or lowering a matter, poor in
itself; so that that old fancy which made the poet's art an
enthusiasm, a form of divine possession, seems almost literally true
of him.

This constant suggestion of an absolute duality between higher and
lower moods, and the work done in them, stimulating one always to
look below the surface, makes the reading of Wordsworth an excellent
sort of training towards the things of art and poetry. It begets in
those, [42] who, coming across him in youth, can bear him at all, a
habit of reading between the lines, a faith in the effect of
concentration and collectedness of mind in the right appreciation of
poetry, an expectation of things, in this order, coming to one by
means of a right discipline of the temper as well as of the
intellect. He meets us with the promise that he has much, and
something very peculiar, to give us, if we will follow a certain
difficult way, and seems to have the secret of a special and
privileged state of mind. And those who have undergone his
influence, and followed this difficult way, are like people who have
passed through some initiation, a disciplina arcani, by submitting to
which they become able constantly to distinguish in art, speech,
feeling, manners, that which is organic, animated, expressive, from
that which is only conventional, derivative, inexpressive.

But although the necessity of selecting these precious morsels for
oneself is an opportunity for the exercise of Wordsworth's peculiar
influence, and induces a kind of just criticism and true estimate of
it, yet the purely literary product would have been more excellent,
had the writer himself purged away that alien element. How perfect
would have been the little treasury, shut between the covers of how
thin a book! Let us suppose the desired separation made, the
electric thread untwined, the golden pieces, [43] great and small,
lying apart together.* What are the peculiarities of this residue?
What special sense does Wordsworth exercise, and what instincts does
he satisfy? What are the subjects and the motives which in him
excite the imaginative faculty? What are the qualities in things and
persons which he values, the impression and sense of which he can
convey to others, in an extraordinary way?

An intimate consciousness of the expression of natural things, which
weighs, listens, penetrates, where the earlier mind passed roughly
by, is a large element in the complexion of modern poetry. It has
been remarked as a fact in mental history again and again. It
reveals itself in many forms; but is strongest and most attractive in
what is strongest and most attractive in modern literature. It is
exemplified, almost equally, by writers as unlike each other as
Senancour and Theophile Gautier: as a singular chapter in the history
of the human mind, its growth might be traced from Rousseau to
Chateaubriand, from Chateaubriand to Victor Hugo: it has doubtless
some latent connexion with those pantheistic theories which locate an
intelligent soul in material things, and have largely exercised men's
minds in some modern systems of philosophy: it is traceable even in
[44] the graver writings of historians: it makes as much difference
between ancient and modern landscape art, as there is between the
rough masks of an early mosaic and a portrait by Reynolds or
Gainsborough. Of this new sense, the writings of Wordsworth are the
central and elementary expression: he is more simply and entirely
occupied with it than any other poet, though there are fine
expressions of precisely the same thing in so different a poet as
Shelley. There was in his own character a certain contentment, a
sort of inborn religious placidity, seldom found united with a
sensibility so mobile as his, which was favourable to the quiet,
habitual observation of inanimate, or imperfectly animate, existence.
His life of eighty years is divided by no very profoundly felt
incidents: its changes are almost wholly inward, and it falls into
broad, untroubled, perhaps somewhat monotonous spaces. What it most
resembles is the life of one of those early Italian or Flemish
painters, who, just because their minds were full of heavenly
visions, passed, some of them, the better part of sixty years in
quiet, systematic industry. This placid life matured a quite unusual
sensibility, really innate in him, to the sights and sounds of the
natural world--the flower and its shadow on the stone, the cuckoo and
its echo. The poem of Resolution and Independence is a storehouse of
such records: for its fulness of imagery it may be compared to
Keats's Saint Agnes' Eve. To [45] read one of his longer pastoral
poems for the first time, is like a day spent in a new country: the
memory is crowded for a while with its precise and vivid incidents--

The pliant harebell swinging in the breeze
On some grey rock ;--

The single sheep and the one blasted tree
And the bleak music from that old stone wall;--

In the meadows and the lower ground
Was all the sweetness of a common dawn;--

And that green corn all day is rustling in thine ears.

Clear and delicate at once, as he is in the outlining of visible
imagery, he is more clear and delicate still, and finely scrupulous,
in the noting of sounds; so that he conceives of noble sound as even
moulding the human countenance to nobler types, and as something
actually "profaned" by colour, by visible form, or image.

He has a power likewise of realising, and conveying to the
consciousness of the reader, abstract and elementary impressions--
silence, darkness, absolute motionlessness: or, again, the whole
complex sentiment of a particular place, the abstract expression of
desolation in the long white road, of peacefulness in a particular
folding of the hills. In the airy building of the brain, a special
day or hour even, comes to have for him a sort of personal identity,
a spirit or angel given to it, by which, for its exceptional [46]
insight, or the happy light upon it, it has a presence in one's
history, and acts there, as a separate power or accomplishment; and
he has celebrated in many of his poems the "efficacious spirit,"
which, as he says, resides in these "particular spots" of time.

It is to such a world, and to a world of congruous meditation
thereon, that we see him retiring in his but lately published poem of
The Recluse--taking leave, without much count of costs, of the world
of business, of action and ambition; as also of all that for the
majority of mankind counts as sensuous enjoyment.*

And so it came about that this sense of a life in natural objects,
which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, is with Wordsworth
the assertion of what for him is almost literal fact. To him every
natural object seemed to possess more or less of a moral or spiritual
life, to be [47] capable of a companionship with man, full of
expression, of inexplicable affinities and delicacies of intercourse.
An emanation, a particular spirit, belonged, not to the moving leaves
or water only, but to the distant peak of the hills arising suddenly,
by some change of perspective, above the nearer horizon, to the
passing space of light across the plain, to the lichened Druidic
stone even, for a certain weird fellowship in it with the moods of
men. It was like a "survival," in the peculiar intellectual
temperament of a man of letters at the end of the eighteenth century,
of that primitive condition, which some philosophers have traced in
the general history of human culture, wherein all outward objects
[48] alike, including even the works of men's hands, were believed to
be endowed with animation, and the world was "full of souls"--that
mood in which the old Greek gods were first begotten, and which had
many strange aftergrowths.

In the early ages, this belief, delightful as its effects on poetry
often are, was but the result of a crude intelligence. But, in
Wordsworth, such power of seeing life, such perception of a soul, in
inanimate things, came of an exceptional susceptibility to the
impressions of eye and ear, and was, in its essence, a kind of
sensuousness. At least, it is only in a temperament exceptionally
susceptible on the sensuous side, that this sense of the
expressiveness of outward things comes to be so large a part of life.
That he awakened "a sort of thought in sense," is Shelley's just
estimate of this element in Wordsworth's poetry.

And it was through nature, thus ennobled by a semblance of passion
and thought, that he approached the spectacle of human life. Human
life, indeed, is for him, at first, only an additional, accidental
grace on an expressive landscape. When he thought of man, it was of
man as in the presence and under the influence of these effective
natural objects, and linked to them by many associations. The close
connexion of man with natural objects, the habitual association of
his thoughts and feelings with a particular spot of earth, has
sometimes seemed to [49] degrade those who are subject to its
influence, as if it did but reinforce that physical connexion of our
nature with the actual lime and clay of the soil, which is always
drawing us nearer to our end. But for Wordsworth, these influences
tended to the dignity of human nature, because they tended to
tranquillise it. By raising nature to the level of human thought he
gives it power and expression: he subdues man to the level of nature,
and gives him thereby a certain breadth and coolness and solemnity.
The leech-gatherer on the moor, the woman "stepping westward," are
for him natural objects, almost in the same sense as the aged thorn,
or the lichened rock on the heath. In this sense the leader of the
"Lake School," in spite of an earnest preoccupation with man, his
thoughts, his destiny, is the poet of nature. And of nature, after
all, in its modesty. The English lake country has, of course, its
grandeurs. But the peculiar function of Wordsworth's genius, as
carrying in it a power to open out the soul of apparently little or
familiar things, would have found its true test had he become the
poet of Surrey, say! and the prophet of its life. The glories of
Italy and Switzerland, though he did write a little about them, had
too potent a material life of their own to serve greatly his poetic
purpose.

Religious sentiment, consecrating the affections and natural regrets
of the human heart, above all, that pitiful awe and care for the [50]
perishing human clay, of which relic-worship is but the corruption,
has always had much to do with localities, with the thoughts which
attach themselves to actual scenes and places. Now what is true of
it everywhere, is truest of it in those secluded valleys where one
generation after another maintains the same abiding-place; and it was
on this side, that Wordsworth apprehended religion most strongly.
Consisting, as it did so much, in the recognition of local
sanctities, in the habit of connecting the stones and trees of a
particular spot of earth with the great events of life, till the low
walls, the green mounds, the half-obliterated epitaphs seemed full of
voices, and a sort of natural oracles, the very religion of these
people of the dales appeared but as another link between them and the
earth, and was literally a religion of nature. It tranquillised them
by bringing them under the placid rule of traditional and narrowly
localised observances. "Grave livers," they seemed to him, under
this aspect, with stately speech, and something of that natural
dignity of manners, which underlies the highest courtesy.

And, seeing man thus as a part of nature, elevated and solemnised in
proportion as his daily life and occupations brought him into
companionship with permanent natural objects, his very religion
forming new links for him with the narrow limits of the valley, the
low vaults of his church, the rough stones of his [51] home, made
intense for him now with profound sentiment, Wordsworth was able to
appreciate passion in the lowly. He chooses to depict people from
humble life, because, being nearer to nature than others, they are on
the whole more impassioned, certainly more direct in their expression
of passion, than other men: it is for this direct expression of
passion, that he values their humble words. In much that he said in
exaltation of rural life, he was but pleading indirectly for that
sincerity, that perfect fidelity to one's own inward presentations,
to the precise features of the picture within, without which any
profound poetry is impossible. It was not for their tameness, but
for this passionate sincerity, that he chose incidents and situations
from common life, "related in a selection of language really used by
men." He constantly endeavours to bring his language near to the
real language of men: to the real language of men, however, not on
the dead level of their ordinary intercourse, but in select moments
of vivid sensation, when this language is winnowed and ennobled by
excitement. There are poets who have chosen rural life as their
subject, for the sake of its passionless repose, and times when
Wordsworth himself extols the mere calm and dispassionate survey of
things as the highest aim of poetical culture. But it was not for
such passionless calm that he preferred the scenes of pastoral life;
and the meditative poet, sheltering [52] himself, as it might seem,
from the agitations of the outward world, is in reality only clearing
the scene for the great exhibitions of emotion, and what he values
most is the almost elementary expression of elementary feelings.

And so he has much for those who value highly the concentrated
presentment of passion, who appraise men and women by their
susceptibility to it, and art and poetry as they afford the spectacle
of it. Breaking from time to time into the pensive spectacle of
their daily toil, their occupations near to nature, come those great
elementary feelings, lifting and solemnising their language and
giving it a natural music. The great, distinguishing passion came to
Michael by the sheepfold, to Ruth by the wayside, adding these humble
children of the furrow to the true aristocracy of passionate souls.
In this respect, Wordsworth's work resembles most that of George
Sand, in those of her novels which depict country life. With a
penetrative pathos, which puts him in the same rank with the masters
of the sentiment of pity in literature, with Meinhold and Victor
Hugo, he collects all the traces of vivid excitement which were to be
found in that pastoral world--the girl who rung her father's knell;
the unborn infant feeling about its mother's heart; the instinctive
touches of children; the sorrows of the wild creatures, even--their
home-sickness, their strange yearnings; the tales of passionate
regret that hang [53] by a ruined farm-building, a heap of stones, a
deserted sheepfold; that gay, false, adventurous, outer world, which
breaks in from time to time to bewilder and deflower these quiet
homes; not "passionate sorrow" only, for the overthrow of the soul's
beauty, but the loss of, or carelessness for personal beauty even, in
those whom men have wronged--their pathetic wanness; the sailor "who,
in his heart, was half a shepherd on the stormy seas"; the wild woman
teaching her child to pray for her betrayer; incidents like the
making of the shepherd's staff, or that of the young boy laying the
first stone of the sheepfold;--all the pathetic episodes of their
humble existence, their longing, their wonder at fortune, their poor
pathetic pleasures, like the pleasures of children, won so hardly in
the struggle for bare existence; their yearning towards each other,
in their darkened houses, or at their early toil. A sort of biblical
depth and solemnity hangs over this strange, new, passionate,
pastoral world, of which he first raised the image, and the
reflection of which some of our best modern fiction has caught from
him.

He pondered much over the philosophy of his poetry, and reading
deeply in the history of his own mind, seems at times to have passed
the borders of a world of strange speculations, inconsistent enough,
had he cared to note such inconsistencies, with those traditional
beliefs, which [54] were otherwise the object of his devout
acceptance. Thinking of the high value he set upon customariness,
upon all that is habitual, local, rooted in the ground, in matters of
religious sentiment, you might sometimes regard him as one tethered
down to a world, refined and peaceful indeed, but with no broad
outlook, a world protected, but somewhat narrowed, by the influence
of received ideas. But he is at times also something very different
from this, and something much bolder. A chance expression is
overheard and placed in a new connexion, the sudden memory of a thing
long past occurs to him, a distant object is relieved for a while by
a random gleam of light--accidents turning up for a moment what lies
below the surface of our immediate experience--and he passes from the
humble graves and lowly arches of "the little rock-like pile" of a
Westmoreland church, on bold trains of speculative thought, and
comes, from point to point, into strange contact with thoughts which
have visited, from time to time, far more venturesome, perhaps
errant, spirits.

He had pondered deeply, for instance, on those strange reminiscences
and forebodings, which seem to make our lives stretch before and
behind us, beyond where we can see or touch anything, or trace the
lines of connexion. Following the soul, backwards and forwards, on
these endless ways, his sense of man's dim, potential powers became a
pledge to him, indeed, of a future life, [55] but carried him back
also to that mysterious notion of an earlier state of existence--the
fancy of the Platonists--the old heresy of Origen. It was in this
mood that he conceived those oft-reiterated regrets for a half-ideal
childhood, when the relics of Paradise still clung about the soul--a
childhood, as it seemed, full of the fruits of old age, lost for all,
in a degree, in the passing away of the youth of the world, lost for
each one, over again, in the passing away of actual youth. It is
this ideal childhood which he celebrates in his famous Ode on the
Recollections of Childhood, and some other poems which may be grouped
around it, such as the lines on Tintern Abbey, and something like
what he describes was actually truer of himself than he seems to have
understood; for his own most delightful poems were really the
instinctive productions of earlier life, and most surely for him,
"the first diviner influence of this world" passed away, more and
more completely, in his contact with experience.

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