Gents Mag 1850 part 2 p.466
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Gentleman's Magazine 1850 part 2 p.466
renown of Wordsworth, have wrought one of the greatest literary revolutions the world has ever seen: and the nerve and purpose to work it were braced and formed under the influence of a corresponding convulsion in politics. Men had already asked themselves the question, shall we continue to obey phantasms, or shall we search for realities; and poets also were beginning to say, at least in Germany and England, is our vocation for the apparent only, or for the true? Verse was regarded no longer as an elegant accomplishment, or the poet merely as one who could amuse a vacant hour, but not instruct a thoughtful one. Childish things were put away; and poetry resumed the dignity, and almost the stature, of its first manhood. His residence in France may be as much regarded as the discipline, as external nature had been the nurse of Wordsworth's mind. France afforded what Cambridge had denied. It aroused in him, for a while at least, an intense sympathy with mankind. His inward eye was turned upon the practical world. He studied society as well as solitude. In the whole range of Wordsworth's writings, we have met with no individual portraiture which, to our feelings, can for an instant compete with his sketches of the royalist and republican officers of the garrison, we presume, of Orleans. We have not room for both; and we therefore extract the picture of the royalists as comprising at least one Shaksperian touch, and as being in itself better adapted to our narrowing limits. The reader of Tennyson will recal one of those parallels which occur, without derivation from each other, in the world of first-rate poets. Of these officers - --- One, reckoning by years, Was in the prime of manhood, and ere while He had sate lord in many tender hearts; Though heedless of such honours now, and changed; His temper was quite mastered by the times, And they had blighted him, had eaten away The beauty of his person, doing wrong Alike to body and to mind; his port, Which once had been erect and open, now Was stooping and contracted, and a face, Endowed by nature with her fairest gifts Of symmetry and light and bloom, expressed, As much as any that was ever seen, A ravage out of season, made by thoughts Unhealthy and vexatious. With the hour, That from the press of Paris duly brought Its freight of public news, the fever came A punctual visitant, to shake this man, Disarmed his voice, and fanned his yellow cheek Into a thousand colours; while he read, Or mused, his sword was haunted by his touch Continually, like an uneasy place In his own body. General Beaupuis, the republican counterpart of the royalist portraiture, might have been the original of Wordsworth's "Happy Warrior," although his end was infelicitous, since in the Vendian war He perished fighting, in supreme command, Upon the borders of the unhappy Loire. By birth Beaupuis ranked amongst the most noble: but in his sympathies with mankind he resembled Clarkson, Howard, and Las Casas, rather than either the ordinary members of his class or the ordinary sharers of his opinions. His character, its depth and benignity, was one of those spiritual births which are rife in revolutionary eras. There are social as well as spiritual regenerations, and this was one of them. As captain of the guards under Louis XIV. Beaupuis would have been marked as a benevolent and enlightened man; in the stormy era of the Grand Monarque's ill-fated descendant he appears as the apostle of general humanity. His compassion to the individual was great; but his sympathy with the race transcended feeling and |
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