Gents Mag 1851 part 2 p.109
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Gentleman's Magazine 1851 part 2 p.109
understanding of all the mysteries and all the majesty of the beautiful land in which he dwelt, daily contemplation of nature under every aspect of turbulence and repose was essential to the poet. His habits of composition more nearly resembled those of an ancient Scald than of an English bard of the nineteenth century. He went "booing" his verses, as his Cumbrian neighbours phrased it, under solstice and equinox indifferently, and through each intermediate change of the rolling seasons, over the mountain-lawns and beside the mountain-torrents, in the heart of mists and under the clear mirror of brumal frost, at earliest dawn when the sheep-fold was opening, and when "Hesper issued forth from the fulgent west." One day a stranger, having walked round the garden and grounds of Rydal Mount, asked one of the female servants, who happened to be at the door, permission to see her master's study. "This," said she, leading him forward, "is my master's library, where he keeps his books; but his study is out of doors." After long absences from home, his cottage-neighbours would say, "Well, there he is; we are glad to hear him 'booing' about again." Long before the pen of the female inmates of his household was called in requisition to transcribe, his murmured verse had been poured forth, formed and polished; and could it, like Retif de la Bretorme's novels, have been transferred at once to type, Wordsworth would probably have left as few manuscripts as "blind Melesigenes" himself. Yet, in despite of his method of composition, he was anything rather than an improviser. At times, indeed, when forcibly impressed by new objects, or by a familiar scene under unusual irradiation, the "divine afflatus" would seize him, and he would pour forth streams of unpremeditated verse. But these occasions were rare: and still more rarely were such impromptus exposed to the public eye. As regarded harmony of sound, Wordsworth describes himself as "an Epicurean." We should not have accorded him this especial attribute, since his blank verse we think on the whole inferior to Cowper's, and his lyrical poems occasionally display both laxity and roughness of cadence. In one so devoted to his art, however, such inequalities may have been as much the result of a theory as of haste or negligence; and that they were not undesigned, but purposed breaks of smoothness, is the more probable from their recurring most frequently in the poems which he composed according to the doctrine of his critical prefaces. In English poetry, Wordsworth was very deeply read. It was, perhaps, his only very profound learning; and his "booing" was as often bestowed upon repetition of favourite passages as upon original composition. He had, however, studied critically the most artistic of the Latin poets, and his poems entitles "Dion," and "Laodamia," and "Lycoris," afford abundant proofs that whatever his scholarship may have been, he entered profoundly into the spirit of antiquity. But no verse had he so deeply explored or would so willingly analyse in conversation as his own. Vanity, we believe, had little or no share in this introspection of his own productions. He had consciously aimed at, he had partially achieved, a great revolution in poetic diction, and the purity of his own idiom, or the truth and beauty of his own images, were the documents and title-deeds of his claim to be a reformer of poesy. Of comtemporary poets, indeed, Wordsworth seems to have spoken with but cold approval, - always, indeed, with the exception of Coleridge, whom he appears to us to overrate. Coleridge was endowed with the metrical faculty in a very unusual measure, and, to speak in tripos-phrase, might be bracketted with Fletcher for the sweetness and variety of his modulations. In this respect Wordsworth was by no means equal to the author of "Christabel," and accordingly by no unnatural inference ascribed to him other poetic functions in proportion. Wordsworth thought that metaphysical speculations had kept Coleridge from verse; but no poet was ever long turned aside from his vocation, if the "mens divinior" were really part of his being. The whole phalanx of school-men, banded with all the iterminable squadrons of French and German metaphysics, would not drive Tennyson from a single outpost. Scott, Southey, and Crabbe, receive very slender praise from the oracle of Rydal Mount. |
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