Philip Tomlinson's piece appeared in the TLS of June 16, 1950
Helen Darbishire
THE POET WORDSWORTH
The Clark Lectures, Trinity College, Cambridge, 1949.
Oxford : Clarendon Press. London : Cumberlege. 7s. 6d.
George Mallaby
WORDSWORTH
A Tribute
Oxford: Blackwell. 7s. 6d.
Howard Sergeant
THE CUMBERLAND WORDSWORTH
Williams and Norgate. 7s.
Judson Stanley Lyon
THE EXCURSION
A Study
New Haven: Yale University Press. London: Cumberlege. 24s.
Muriel Spark and Derek Stanford, editors
TRIBUTE TO WORDSWORTH
Foreword by Herbert Read. Allan Wingate. 12s. 6d.
Of all celebrants of this centenary year none is so sure of attention and none
so deserving of it as Miss Helen Darbishire, who but a few months ago
completed the labours of Ernest de Selincourt on the Oxford variorum text of
Wordsworth’s poems. Her slim volume, containing the Clark Lectures of 1949,
is among the most sensible appraisements of the poet since his death. It is
modest, unsensational, charming and lithe in writing, discriminating in
criticism, and it indulges in none of the equivocal psychological fantasies
which claim to be the “ realistic approach.” The invitation to deliver the
lectures, she says, reached her at Grasmere, where she had spent the best
part of three years reading Wordsworth’s manuscripts in Dove Cottage and,
though she had thought never again to talk or write about the subject,
providentially the invitation gave her the stimulus to gather together in
that infective environment some of her findings and reflections on the poet.
Miss Darbishire makes no attempt to dissect the poetry of the long decline,
but directs her examination only to the great creative decade, 1798 to 1808,
on which rests Wordsworth’s title of great poet. Fluency, constant and
unkind, never left him, but the old majesty and the gleam vibrated rarely.
Tidings of invisible things lost authenticity and grew in dullness as they
became more and more dependent on Church doctrine and less and less on
poetic vision. Some critics find it more exciting to discover reasons for
this than to give thanks for the 10 years of full command and resource. Miss
Darbishire is concerned with Wordsworth the man only in so far as knowledge
of his life and character deepens understanding of his poetry. She will have
nothing to do with the Man and the Mask theory, and dismisses the Annette
Vallon love affair as an unproved and unprovable explanation of declension.
Psychological explanations, especially when a secret only partly revealed is
involved, are seldom satisfactory. Science has no more explained the
connexion between artistic creation and the physical and mental state of the
artist than it has explained consciousness. Miss Darbishire’s answer to the
obstinate questioning about the later Wordsworth is simply:
The spirit bloweth where it listeth. When it ceases to blow, or blows but
feebly and fitfully, what is a poet to do? Like Coleridge, plunge into
metaphysics? Wordsworth took the way that was inevitable for him: he
doggedly pursued his vocation, pursued it as a man with a moral purpose and
as a self-respecting craftsman.
If nothing had survived but the work that the craftsman with a mission
produced before and after the great decade we should rank him as a
distinguished but unequal minor poet who promised to be something better.
There were two Wordsworths, who met but were never one: the inspired young
man of the happy days with Coleridge, and the strong-willed man who laboured
in his vocation the more assiduously as the inspiration dwindled to death.
What happened to the poet between the writing of An Evening Walk (under, as
he said later, “ the injurious influence of Erasmus Darwin’s dazzling
manner”) and the full flowering of 1798? Several things. First the hopes and
then the fears of the French Revolution, in which was involved the affair
with Annette Vallon. His heart was searched by these events. Coleridge now
came on the scene and Dorothy was restored to Wordsworth. The change in his
poetry, as Miss Darbishire shows, is felt through and through, in every
aspect of subject-matter and form. The tumultuous year in France was in one
sense an interruption of steady development, but in another a powerful
stimulus to the growth of his mind and of his poetic faculty. The revolution
promised to translate his ideal of man’s worth into fact, though it
disastrously belied its promise. In his country wanderings he looked for
confirmation of his belief that the elementary feelings, the essential
passions of the heart are at the purest and simplest in humble and rustic
people. These were the powers in human nature which were like the primal
energies of Nature. As Miss Darbishire says:
Their strength, force and beauty seem to spring from the same source; through
them men and Nature are one. This was his discovery. When he reached this
truth, and it remained truth for him to the end, his mind had recovered its
tone, his imagination was released, and the poetry of the Lyrical Ballads
and the Lines Composed above Tintern Abbey followed.
There are the eternal notes of sadness and suffering in the Lyrical Ballads,
but of triumph, too. Both poets had found happiness, and Wordsworth his
theme and the language for it. Recapturing childhood intimacies with nature,
he had discovered also the antidote to dejection. “It is the honorable
characteristic of poetry,” he said in the Advertisement to the Lyrical
Ballads, “ that its materials are to be found in every subject that can
interest the human mind.” Revolutionary doctrine then; but it meant
emancipation for future English poets.
The division between the two Wordsworths is documented by the poet. It is made
clear in the comparison of The Prelude as published after his death in 1850
and the text of 1805 as revealed by Ernest de Selincourt. Here is the
central point of interest in Miss Darbishire’s book. First, she makes a
minute examination of the puzzling chronology of the poem – made more
difficult by Wordworth’s haziness in chronology – and generally she is in
agreement with de Selincourt and Professor Garrod, but directs fresh light
on certain obscurities. Coleridge was Wordsworth’s goad in the projected
philosophical poem, The Recluse and his constant support. It was Coleridge’s
plan that Wordsworth should “assume the station of a man in repose, and so
prepared to deliver upon authority a system of philosophy.” Though
Wordsworth wished to be known later as a teacher and nothing else, a system
was beyond his mastery. He had ideas and images in abundance, but no
constructive plan, and, to use Miss Darbishire’s jest, “all that was
accomplished of the great philosophical poem, apart from Book I and the
magnificent Prospectus, was a Prelude to the main theme and an Excursion
from it.” Revelations personal and poetical come through the analysis of the
early text and the published text of 1850. With a touch here and a new patch
there, Wordsworth turned “what was a glorified private letter to Coleridge
into a poetic confession fit for the medium of cold print.” Several
suppressions give mournful testimony of the dreary sea that had flowed
between them. A poignant note in a few deleted lines in Wordsworth’s hand
(they have not been published) was found by Miss Darbishire in an early
note-book of Dorothy’s:
Friend of my heart and Genius, we had reach’d
A small green island which I was well pleased
To pass not lightly by, for though I felt
Strength unabated, yet I seem’d to need
Thy cheering voice, or ere I could pursue
My voyage, resting else for ever there.
Coleridge’s “most loving soul” becomes “capacious soul,” his “gentle spirit” a
“kindred influence,” the claim “though twins almost in genius
and mind” is struck out. Other changes are more vital, for they often mar
the poetry and disguise the truth by overlaying and obscuring the immediate
expression. Some day perhaps all these matters will go out of mind. But the
voice of the poet will go on, the voice, said Wordsworth, which “without
imagination cannot be heard.”
Mr. Mallaby’s book is not, and is not intended to be, a learned treatise on
Wordsworth’s poetry or lines of thought. Professor Garrod, deep in
Wordsworth studies, highly approves this work, which he calls a personal
document. Instead of seeking absolute values, Mr. Mallaby “wishes the reader
to know what Wordsworth has meant to him.” Like Miss Darbishire, the author
fixes attention on the golden decade and reaches much the same decisions as
she does. There is a pleasant humility of presentation in this study, but it
is sound criticism and can be commended especially to youth just embarking
on Wordsworth’s pomp of waters. Since so much has been said of the
differences between the two versions of the Prelude, it should be pointed
out that Mr. Mallaby concludes that it matters little which one is read: in
the earlier, “the feeling is more genuine and spontaneous; in the later, the
style is, generally speaking, stronger and more finished.” Genuineness and
spontaneity surely should be decisive qualities in poetry or philosophy;
but, whatever preference may be felt, either version is an astonishing
performance. A whole chapter on The Excursion is a closely reasoned
statement on the evidence of decline. Resolution and Independence is also
given a chapter to establish the contention that it illustrates better than
any other of the shorter poems Wordsworth’s purposes and style.
Mr. Sergeant also concentrates on the young Wordsworth, with concluding
reflections on the fading light. Unlike Mr. Mallaby, he flourishes some
intellectual cutlery, but it is good cutlery and he makes most pleasing
passes. He has nothing new to contribute on the Annette Vallon affair, which
makes it an occasion to be grateful to him for a factual retelling. The
story is being lost in inventions about it introduced to fit a theory. We do
not know all the facts, perhaps shall never know them. With a proper regard
from what we do know, we see the young poet and his love emerge more
innocent and more sensible than uncurbed speculation pictures them. Annette,
the revolution and the wars threw Wordsworth into a despondency and a
conflict of ideas from which his sister and Coleridge rescued him, to start
upon the most creative period of his life. When the cloud lifted the
development was rapid. He and Coleridge were equally in debt to that
friendship. It is improbable that Wordsworth fully understood Coleridge’s
intricate arguments, but what he did gain was, as Mr. Sergeant insists, the
confirmation and amplification of ideas with which he had been fumbling for
years. Coleridge’s swift emancipation has received less attention. There is
sound reason in Mr. Sergeant’s point that S. T. C. learned from his friend a
new approach to his own ideas; and the influence can be detected in a late
Coleridgean observation on the effect when the feelings are wrought upon by
the belief in something mysterious: “Then it is that religion and poetry
strike deepest.” This is the whole Wordsworth doctrine. “The earth and every
common sight . . . apparelled in celestial light.” Mr. Sergeant’s
explanation of the decline is simpler than most and better than many. No
poet was committed more inevitably to a dependence upon the vitality of his
sensations. It was the secret of his strength and it was in the natural
order of things, though a few poets have defied nature, that the vitality
should lessen under the onset of the confiscating years.
Dr. Lyon’s purpose is to reverse the general opinion of The Excursion. His
book is clearly the result of long concentration on the life and works of
Wordsworth. Criticism has usually followed the poet’s own early precept on
the “powers necessary for the production of poetry,” and by those criteria
The Excursion has been found lacking. For Dr. Lyon the long poem, though it
has many flaws, is an important focal point in Wordsworth’s development,
deserving closer attention than it has had. It is cleverly argued, and some
readers may find it persuasive in spite of their own experiences with The
Excursion. The poem is one easy to find faults in; but it is a work in its
entirety not easy to discount. The best of the new contributions in Tribute
to Wordsworth is Mr. Herbert Read’s foreword. The editors have made a
selection of essays and abstracts from nineteenth-century critics, beginning
with Hazlitt, and from present-day writers, the latter writing specially for
this book. The symposium should be useful as a record of things said about
Wordsworth. Read as a whole, the effect is confusing, like a stunning blow.
