during a four days' ramble with his sister; he began it on leaving Tintern, and concluded it as he was entering Bristol. His residence amidst strange scenes and “unknown men” at Goslar was particularly fruitful. She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways, Ruth, Nutting, There was a Boy, Wisdom and Spirit of the Universe, all belong to those few months of unfamiliar environment. The breeze that met him as he issued from the city gates on his homeward journey brought him the first thought of The Prelude.
At the end of 1790 he was settled at Grasmere, in the Lake District, and seeing much of Coleridge. The second year of his residence at Grasmere was unproductive, he was “hard at work” then on The Excursion, but the excitement of a tour on the Continent in the autumn of 1802, combined perhaps with a happy change in his pecuniary circumstances and the near prospect of marriage, roused him to one of his happiest fits of activity. His first great sonnet, the Lilies on Westminster Bridge, was composed on the roof of the Dover coach; the first of the splendid series “dedicated to national independence and liberty,” the most generally impressive and universally intelligible of his poems, Fair Star of Evening, Once did She hold the Gorgeous East in Fee, Toussaint; Milton, thou shouldst be Living at this Hour; It is not to be Thought of that the Flood, When I have Borne in Memory what has Tamed, were all written in the course of the tour, or in London in the month after his return. A tour in Scotland in the following year, 1803, yielded the Highland Girl and The Solitary Reaper. Soon after his return he resumed The Prelude; and The Affliction of Margaret and the Ode to Duty, his greatest poems in two different veins, were coincident with the exaltation of spirit due to the triumphant and successful prosecution of the long-delayed work. The Character of the Happy Warrior, which he described to Harriet Martineau as “a chain of extremely valuable thoughts,” though it did not fulfil “poetic conditions,”[1] was the product of a calmer period. The excitement of preparing for publication always had a rousing effect upon him; the preparation for the edition of 1807 resulted in the completion of the ode on the Intimations of Immortality, the sonnets The World is too much with us, Methought I saw the Footsteps of a Throne, Two Voices are there, and Lady, the Songs of Spring were in the Grove, and the Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle. After 1807 there is a marked falling off in the quality, though not in the quantity, of Wordsworth's poetic work. It is significant of the comparatively sober and laborious spirit in which he wrote The Excursion that its progress was accompanied by none of those casual sallies of exulting and exuberant power that mark the period of the happier Prelude. The completion of The Excursion was signalized by the production of Laodamia. The chorus of adverse criticism with which it was received inspired him in the noble sonnet to Haydon—High is our Calling, Friend. He rarely or never again touched the same lofty height.
It is interesting to compare with what he actually accomplished the plan of life-work with which Wordsworth settled at Grasmere in the last month of 1799.[2] The plan was definitely conceived as he left the German town of Goslar in the spring of 1799. Tired of the wandering unsettled life that he had led hitherto, dissatisfied also with the fragmentary occasional and disconnected character of his lyrical poems, he longed for a permanent home among his native hills, where he might, as one called and consecrated to the task, devote his powers continuously to the composition of a great philosophical poem on “Man, Nature and Society.” The poem was to be called The Recluse, “as having for its principal subject the sensations and opinions of a poet living in retirement.” He communicated the design to Coleridge, who gave him enthusiastic encouragement to proceed. But, though he had still before him fifty years of peaceful life amidst his beloved scenery, the work in the projected form at least was destined to remain incomplete. Doubts and misgivings soon arose, and favourable moments of felt inspiration delayed their coming. To sustain him in his resolution he thought of writing as an introduction, or, as he put it, an antechapel to the church which he proposed to build, a history of his own mind up to the time when he recognized the great mission of his life. One of the many laughs at his expense by unsympathetic critics has been directed against his saying that he wrote this Prelude of fourteen books about himself out of diffidence. But in truth the original motive was distrust of his own powers. He turned aside to prepare the second volume of the Lyrical Ballads and write the explanatory Preface, which as a statement of his aims in poetry had partly the same purpose of strengthening his self-confidence. From his sister's Journal we learn that in the winter of 1801-1802 he was “hard at work on The Pedlar”—the original title of The Excursion. But this experiment on the larger work was also soon abandoned. It appears from a letter to his friend Sir George Beaumont that his health was far from robust, and in particular that he could not write without intolerable physical uneasiness. His next start with The Prelude, in the spring of 1804, was more prosperous; he dropped it for several months, but, resuming again in the spring of 1805, he completed it in the summer of that year. In 1807 appeared two volumes of collected poems. It was not till 1814 that the second of the three divisions of The Recluse, ultimately named The Excursion, was ready for publication; and he went no further in the execution of his great design.
The derisive fury with which The Excursion was assailed upon its first appearance has long been a stock example of critical blindness, yet the error of the first critics is seen to lie not in their indictment of faults, but in the prominence they gave to the faults and their generally disrespectful tone towards a poet of Wordsworth's greatness. Jeffrey's petulant “This will never do,” uttered, professedly at least, more in sorrow than in anger, because the poet would persist in spite of all friendly counsel in misapplying his powers, has become a byword of critical cocksureness. But The Excursion has not “done,” and even Wordsworthians who laugh at Jeffrey are in the habit of repeating the substance of his criticism.
Jeffrey, it will be seen, was not blind to the occasional felicities and unforgettable lines celebrated by Coleridge, and his general judgment on The Excursion has been abundantly ratified.[3] It is not upon The Excursion that Wordsworth's reputation as a poet can ever rest. The two “books” entitled The Churchyard among the Mountains are the only parts of the poem that derive much force from the scenic setting; if they had been published separately, they would probably have obtained at once a reception very different from that given to The Excursion as a whole. The dramatic setting is merely dead weight, not because the chief speaker is a pedlar—Wordsworth fairly justifies this selection—but because the pedlar, as a personality to be known, and loved, and respected, and listened to with interest, is not completely created.
There can be little doubt that adverse criticism had a depressing influence on Wordsworth's poetical powers, notwithstanding his nobly expressed defiance of it and his determination to hold on in his own path undisturbed. Its effect in retarding the sale of his poems was a favourite topic with him in his later years;[4] but the absence of general appreciation, and the ridicule of what he considered his best and most distinctive work, contributed in all probability to a still more importunate result—the premature depression and deadening of his powers.
- ↑ This casual estimate of his own work is not merely amusing but also instructive, as showing—what is sometimes denied—that Wordsworth himself knew well enough the difference between “poetry” and such “valuable thoughts” as he propounded in The Excursion.
- ↑ Wordsworth's residences in the Lake District were at Dove Cottage, Townend, Grasmere, from December 1799 till the spring of 1808; Allen Bank, from 1808 to 1811; the parsonage at Grasmere from 1811 to 1813; Rydal Mount, for the rest of his life. Dove Cottage was bought in 1891 as a public memorial, and is held by trustees.
- ↑ Ward's English Poets, iv. 13.
- ↑ Matthew Arnold heard him say that “for he knew not how many years his poetry had never brought him in enough to buy his shoe-strings” (preface to Selection, p. v.). The literal facts are that he received £100 from the Longmans in 1800, and nothing more till he was sixty-five when Moxon bought the copyright of his writings for £1000 {Prose Works, iii. 437).
