Studies in Literature | Page 9

Gray which every beholder
does not equally think and feel. To find beautiful and pathetic language,
set to harmonious numbers, for the common impressions of meditative
minds, is no small part of the poet's task. That part has never been
achieved by any poet in any tongue with more complete perfection and
success than in the immortal _Elegy_, of which we may truly say that it
has for nearly a century and a half given to greater multitudes of men
more of the exquisite pleasure of poetry than any other single piece in
all the glorious treasury of English verse. It abounds, as Johnson says,
"with images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to
which every bosom returns an echo." These moving commonplaces of
the human lot Gray approached through books and studious
contemplation; not, as Wordsworth approached them, by daily contact
with the lives and habit of men and the forces and magical apparitions
of external nature. But it is a narrow view to suppose that the men of
the eighteenth century did not look through the literary conventions of
the day to the truths of life and nature behind them. The conventions
have gone, or are changed, and we are all glad of it. Wordsworth
effected a wholesome deliverance when he attacked the artificial
diction, the personifications, the allegories, the antitheses, the barren
rhymes and monotonous metres, which the reigning taste had approved.
But while welcoming the new freshness, sincerity, and direct and fertile
return on nature, that is a very bad reason why we should disparage
poetry so genial, so simple, so humane, and so perpetually pleasing, as
the best verse of the rationalistic century.
What Wordsworth did was to deal with themes that had been partially
handled by precursors and contemporaries, in a larger and more
devoted spirit, with wider amplitude of illustration, and with the
steadfastness and persistency of a religious teacher. "Every great poet is
a teacher," he said; "I wish to be considered as a teacher or as nothing."
It may be doubted whether his general proposition is at all true, and

whether it is any more the essential business of a poet to be a teacher
than it was the business of Handel, Beethoven, or Mozart. They attune
the soul to high states of feeling; the direct lesson is often as nought.
But of himself no view could be more sound. He is a teacher, or he is
nothing. "To console the afflicted; to add sunshine to daylight by
making the happy happier; to teach the young and the gracious of every
age to see, to think, and feel, and therefore to become more actively
and sincerely virtuous"--that was his vocation; to show that the mutual
adaptation of the external world and the inner mind is able to shape a
paradise from the "simple produce of the common day"--that was his
high argument.
Simplification was, as I have said elsewhere, the keynote of the
revolutionary time. Wordsworth was its purest exponent, but he had
one remarkable peculiarity, which made him, in England at least, not
only its purest but its greatest. While leading men to pierce below the
artificial and conventional to the natural man and natural life, as
Rousseau did, Wordsworth still cherished the symbols, the traditions,
and the great institutes of social order. Simplification of life and
thought and feeling was to be accomplished without summoning up the
dangerous spirit of destruction and revolt. Wordsworth lived with
nature, yet waged no angry railing war against society. The chief
opposing force to Wordsworth in literature was Byron. Whatever he
was in his heart, Byron in his work was drawn by all the forces of his
character, genius, and circumstances to the side of violent social change,
and hence the extraordinary popularity of Byron in the continental
camp of emancipation. Communion with nature is in Wordsworth's
doctrine the school of duty. With Byron nature is the mighty consoler
and the vindicator of the rebel.
A curious thing, which we may note in passing, is that Wordsworth,
who clung fervently to the historic foundations of society as it stands,
was wholly indifferent to history; while Byron, on the contrary, as the
fourth canto of Childe Harold is enough to show, had at least the
sentiment of history in as great a degree as any poet that ever lived, and
has given to it by far the most magnificent expression. No doubt, it was
history on its romantic, rather than its philosophic or its political side.
On Wordsworth's exact position in the hierarchy of sovereign poets, a
deep difference of estimate still divides even the most excellent judges.

Nobody now dreams of placing him so low as the Edinburgh Reviewers
did, nor so high as Southey placed him when he wrote to