Gents Mag 1850 part 2 p.460
|
|
|
|
|
introduction | ||
|
|
list, 3rd qtr 19th century | ||
|
|
previous page
next page |
||
|
Gentleman's Magazine 1850 part 2 p.460
poet; four to his university career and his first continental travels; two to a brief residence in London after quitting Cambridge, and to a retrospect of his intellectual being and progress up to that time. The next three books record his residence in France, partly at Paris, but principally in the Loire, during the eventful period of the king's flight and capture, and the deadly struggle of the Girondins with Robespierre. The three remaining books treat of the detrimental effects of artificial life upon imagination and taste, and of the healing process of nature in regenerating them, by bracing the intellectual nerves, and restoring the inner eye and power of intuition for the mysteries and microcosm of external and human nature. In the fourteenth book - The Conclusion - the reconcilement and restoration have been effected, and the basis of the poetical life is at length built upon broad and perdurable foundations. Such is the general outline of the Prelude. Its component parts - its tone and impasto, to borrow a painter's phrase, are at least equal to the best of Wordsworth's earlier published works, and, in our opinion at least, superior to all of them except his best lyrical ballads, his best sonnets, and his Ode to Immortality. Reynolds's earlier pictures possess a vigour and truth of colouring which are not always found in his later efforts. He went astray after a theory. Wordsworth, in like manner, by a perverse crochet about diction, shackled the strength and freedom of his more mature works. Because English poetry, since the age of Charles the Second, had been over-run by gaudy exotics, none but indigenous words - "the language of rustic life" - should be admitted, if he adhered to his theory, into his parterre. Fortunately his practice and his maxims were generally at variance, or instead of Peter Bell, the Waggoner, and the sonnets, the world might have been cumbered with a repetition of Ambrose Phillips's pastorals. His imagination and his taste were too potent and pure for the laws he would have imposed upon them. They broke the new cords; they burst into green wyths; they triumphed by disobedience; and while professing to speak in the language of common life, they attained to "the large utterance of the early gods." In the Prelude, however, as well as in Wordsorth's poetry generally, there are peculiar and characteristic defects. There is an occasional laxity of phrase, there is a want of precision in form, and there is an absence of deep and vital sympathy with men, their works, and ways. Wordsworth in many of his sonnets, as well as in the poem now before us, represents himself as roused and enkindled in no ordinary degree by the dawn and earlier movements of the French revolution; and in the Excursion, under the character of the Solitary, he transcribes his own sensations at that momentous epoch. Yet in each of these cases he utters the sentiments of the philosopher rather than the citizen; of the Lucretian spectator more than of one himself caught and impelled by the heaving and boiling billows. His lyric emotion is brief; his speculative contemplation is infinite; he evinces awakened curiosity rather than spiritual fellowship. In Shelley's poetry, especially his "Prometheus" and "Revolt of Islam," we seem, as it were, to be confronted by that yawning and roaring furnace into which the opinions and institutions of the past were being hurled. In Wordsworth's most excited mood we have rather the reflexion of the flame than the authentic or derivative fire itself. Its heat and glare pass to us through some less pervious and colder lens. In Shelley again - we are contrasting not his poetry but his idiosyncrasy with that of Wordsworth - we encounter in its full vigour the erotic element of poetry, the absence of which in Wordsworth is so remarkable, that of all poets of equal rank and power in other respects, he, and he alone, may be said to have dispensed with it all together. The sensuous element was omitted in his composition. His sympathies are absorbed by the magnifience and the mystery of external nature, or by the vigour and freshness of the human soul when under immediate contact with nature's elemental forms and influences. Neither was there ever any poet of his degree less dramatic than Wordsworth. All the life in his ballads, in his narative poems, in his Excursion, is the reflex of his own being. The actors in his scenes are severe, aloof, stately, |
|||
|
|
next page | ||
|
|
|||
Lakes Guides menu.