Art. 7.-A NEW LIFE OF WORDSWORTH.

1. William Wordsworth. His Life, Works and Influence. By Prof. G. M. Harper. Two vols. Murray, 1916. 2. The Early Life of William Wordsworth, 1770-1798. By Emile Legouis. Translated by J. W. Matthews. Dent, 1897.

3. The Patriotic Poetry of William Wordsworth. A Selection (with Introduction and Notes). By Right Hon. A. H. D. Acland. Clarendon Press, 1915.

4. Wordsworth's Tract on the Convention of Cintra, with two Letters of Wordsworth written in the year 1811. Now republished, with an Introduction by A. V. Dicey. Milford, 1915.

THIS is the first life of Wordsworth which has been written by a man in possession of all the facts and able to use them freely and openly. The poet's nephew wrote his Memoir perhaps from still fuller knowledge, but was inevitably prevented, by relationship and other considerations, from giving all he knew to the public. Frederic Myers's admirable little book is a study, not a biography. M. Emile Legouis's 'Jeunesse de Wordsworth' is excellent so far as it goes, but it deals with only twentyeight of the eighty years of the poet's life. The only regular Biography is that by Prof. Knight, which is not well put together, is somewhat inaccurate, and is very far from covering the whole ground.

The field was therefore still open for a final Life of Wordsworth; and it is not much to our credit that it has been left to an American to make the first serious attempt to occupy it. Prof. Harper has had great advantages. He has been allowed by the poet's grandson not only to see but to publish much unprinted material, and has received his advice and assistance. He has also been allowed by Mr Frank Marshall to print a good many new letters of Dorothy Wordsworth, which have the power and charm of everything written by that true woman of genius. The result is a much fuller account than any previous book has given of the generally known facts of Wordsworth's life and character, and a few discoveries of importance, the most surprising of which is the fact, which has amused the profane, that Wordsworth

had a natural daughter by a French woman whom he knew in his Revolutionary days. This long-concealed story has of course given some pleasure to the many people who have been exasperated by the elderly Wordsworth's open and tactless consciousness of his own virtues. But the faithful need have no fears. The story of Annette and her daughter Caroline (of whom, and not of Dorothy, the poet was thinking when he wrote the line:

'Dear child, dear girl, that walkest with me here')

redounds as a whole very greatly to Wordsworth's honour. What is striking in it is not the fact of a young poet in a foreign country, away from all the restraints of home and family, falling into a connexion of this sort, especially as it appears it was not his fault that it did not lead to marriage. It is rather the fact that he never tried to escape, as he so easily could have done, from the responsibility in which it had involved him. He put himself to the pain of revealing the truth to his sister and afterwards to his wife; he and they kept up communications with both mother and daughter, and took an active interest in the latter's marriage; and, when he was fifty and already justly exalted as much by his virtues as by his genius to a peculiar pedestal of honour and even reverence, he took his disciple Crabb Robinson to see both ladies at Paris. So let the cynics and Bohemians, who always hasten to rejoice at any discovery of vice or weakness in better men than themselves, pause before they assume that this story delivers Wordsworth into their hands. It does not. Taken as a whole, it is a story not of vice, but of virtue; not of weakness, but of strength.

This is the most striking novelty in Mr Harper's book. For the rest it tells the familiar story with greater detail and accuracy than it has ever been told before. But yet it cannot be the final Life. The chance of writing that Mr Harper has missed, partly by lack of sympathy and partly by lack of ability. He is in the first place a mediocre writer. His style lacks force and clearness as well as any kind of distinction. It is respectable but never anything more. Or, as that is an epithet which

Mr Harper particularly dislikes and generally misunderstands, let us call it pedestrian; and it is often somewhat shuffling and shambling at that. He uses pronouns, for instance, very loosely, and one is not always sure to whom they refer. He is capable of such perverse pedantries as calling Brunswick 'Braunschweig.' One might as reasonably speak of St John as St Joannes. There is also a lack of lucidity in his arrangement of his material. He is, for instance, much concerned to assert that 'The Prelude,' as we have it, is not the poem as it was originally written; and the point is one of interest and importance. But Mr Harper's method of dealing with it is extraordinary. He repeats the assertion over and over again, to the irritation of the reader who asks for some evidence for it. But he gives no proof, and even in one place implies that he has none to give. 'It is not known,' he says once, whether "The Prelude" was not considerably retouched before Wordsworth's death.' Yet all the while he had the proof which he would not give. A letter of Miss Fenwick's written in 1839 speaks of the poet as working for six or seven hours a day at the 'revising of his grand autobiographical poem.' This may not prove all that Mr Harper asserts, but it does show that 'The Prelude,' as we have it, is not precisely the poem read to Coleridge in January 1807; and, if Mr Harper had quoted it at once instead of at the very end of his book, he would have saved himself some trouble and his readers some irritation.

Another reason why this cannot be the definitive Life of Wordsworth is its author's weakness on the side of criticism. No poetry has exercised so much influence on subsequent poets as that of Wordsworth. It is, therefore, in his case more than usually important to understand exactly where his strength and his weakness as a poet lie. How absolutely unfit Mr Harper is for the performance of this difficult task is sufficiently seen by the fact that the two qualities in which he again and again declares Wordsworth to have been preeminent are 'consummate technical skill' and 'versatility,' the exact points in which he stands conspicuously below all our other great poets. Mr Harper positively declares that in all Wordsworth's works both of verse and of prose, with the single exception of The Excursion,' he exhibits

'artistic finish' and 'the true artist's instinct for design.' He frequently selects very ordinary poems for high praise, as when he strangely declares that the lines beginning 'Life with yon lambs' are 'one of Wordsworth's best poems'; and he is once at least capable of a serious misinterpretation of a very well-known poem, as when he asserts that 'piety,' in the famous lines from 'The Rainbow' prefixed to the great Ode, is used in its original sense of reverence for filial obligation.' To say this is, of course, to miss the whole idea of the poem, one of the central ideas of Wordsworth's philosophy. It is not the piety of the grown man towards the memories of his own childhood which he is only or chiefly thinking of. He is thinking of another and still older piety, that natural piety' which makes and has always made the heart of man leap with wonder, joy or fear when he beholds the 'rainbow in the sky'; and it is that sort of piety which he hopes will bind together his youth and age and without which he would prefer to die.

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After such blunders as these as in his own special subject, one is not surprised at finding Mr Harper class Milton, Waller, Dryden and Pope together as poets who all wrote in the academic manner'; and one merely smiles at such an ineptitude as his calling Crabb Robinson 'the Pepys of that generation.' It is easier to explain his indignation with Wordsworth for alluding to angels in some of his poems and his confident assertion that the 'date of these beings is out'; or even his strange denunciation of the Sonnet Retirement' as 'thoroughly immoral, as bad as the work of any Epicurean poet of the Roman decadence.' For anti-religious, as well as religious, intolerance has always blundered over the criticism of poetry which is out of the reach of either. If Retirement' is immoral, so is the whole of that very 'decadent and Epicurean' poet Cowper; and, if it was wicked of Wordsworth to talk of angels even in a metaphor, what is to be said of the unorthodox Shelley's 'angels of rain and lightning' and its thousand parallels?

The truth apparently is that the natural bent of Mr Harper's mind is not towards art or poetry at all. It is towards ethics and above all towards politics. Of any disinterested enjoyment of poetry in itself there is

scarcely a hint in all his nine hundred pages. The reason why he likes Wordsworth's reforms in the subjects and language of poetry is that he considers them democratic reforms abolishing the fashionable exclusiveness of previous poetry. The reason why he dislikes the poetry of Wordsworth's middle-age is not that much of it is commonplace, but that none of it is revolutionary. The Wordsworth in whom he is interested is the young man who went to France and threw himself into the Revolutionary cause. No doubt that period is profoundly important in Wordsworth's life. But there does not appear to be any foundation for Mr Harper's notion that without it he would never have been a great poet. On the contrary, the elements which afterwards united and expressed themselves in his poetry-including his profound sympathy with peasants and humble folk generallywere conspicuous in his boyhood; and the permanent and poetic part of them owes far more to Hawkshead than to Paris. He wrote no great poetry in France; indeed he wrote none after his return till the storm of revolutionary excitement had to a large extent settled down. And that storm was neither so violent nor so lasting as Mr Harper constantly asserts. His view is that Wordsworth's 'state of mind' about 'distinctions of high and low' was a result of his conversion to the equalitarian creed of the French Revolution.' He imagines the second visit to France and the friendship with Beaupuy to have been the most important events in the poet's life. He pictures Wordsworth as becoming a new man under their influence, a passionate politician of the French revolutionary type, a child of 'The Enlightenment,' living for a creed of social and political abstractions, a doctrinaire in politics, a free-thinker in religion. And he supposes this mood to have lasted more or less for some years after the return to England. He even declares that during all the earlier part of Wordsworth's life, apparently up to Waterloo, his chief interest was political.'

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Now, a fraction of this is true, of course, but so little that the portrait as a whole is a mere caricature. Mr Harper can be refuted out of his own pages. Wordsworth's letters from France show none of this enthusiasm. They confirm his later statement in 'The Prelude' that he was