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From The Fortnightly Review.
ON WORDSWORTH.

BY WALTER H. PATER.

alien element in Wordsworth's work, which never coalesced with what is really delightful in it, nor underwent his special SOME English critics at the beginning power. Who that values his writings of the present century said a great deal most has not felt the intrusion there from concerning a distinction, of much import- time to time of something tedious and ance, as they thought, in the true esti- prosaic? Of all great poets, perhaps he mate of poetry, between the Fancy and would gain most by a skilfully made ananother, profounder faculty, the Imagina-thology. Such a selection would show tion. This metaphysical distinction, bor- perhaps not so much what he was, or to rowed originally from the writings of himself or others seemed to be, as what German philosophers, and perhaps not by the more energetic and fertile tenalways clearly apprehended by those who dency in his writings he was ever tendtalked of it, involved a far deeper and ing to become; is, therefore, to the immore vital distinction, with which indeed aginative reason. And the mixture in his all true criticism more or less directly has work, as it actually stands, is so perto do, the distinction namely between plexed that one fears to miss the least higher and lower degrees of intensity in promising composition even, lest some the poet's perception of his subject, and precious morsel should be lying hidden in his concentration of himself upon his within, the few perfect lines, the phrase, work. Of those who dwelt upon the the single word even, to which he often metaphysical distinction between the works up mechanically through a poem, Fancy and the Imagination, it was Words- almost the whole of which may be tame worth who made the most of it, assuming enough. He who thought that in all creit as the basis for the final classifi-ative work the larger part was given pascation of his poetical writings; and it is in these writings that the deeper and more vital distinction which, as I have said, underlies the metaphysical distinction, is most needed and may best be illustrated.

sively to the recipient mind, who waited
so dutifully upon the gift, to whom so
large a measure was sometimes given,
had his times also of desertion and re-
lapse, and he has permitted the impress
of these too to remain in his work.
this duality there, the fitfulness with
which the higher qualities manifest them-

And

of a power not altogether his own, or under his control, which comes and goes when it will, lifting or lowering a matter poor in itself; so that that old fancy which made the poet's art an enthusiasm, a form of divine possession, seems almost literally true of him.

For nowhere is there so perplexed a mixture as in Wordsworth's own poetry, of work touched with intense and indi-selves in it, gives the effect in his poetry vidual power, with work of almost no character at all. He has much conventional sentiment, and some of that insincere poetic diction against which his most serious critical efforts were directed; the reaction in his political ideas, consequent on the excesses of 1795, makes him at times a declaimer on moral and social This constant suggestion of an absotopics; and he seems sometimes to force lute duality between higher and lower an unwilling pen and write by rule. By moods, and the work done in them, stimmaking the most of these blemishes it is ulating one always to look below the surpossible to obscure the real aesthetic face, makes the reading of Wordsworth value of his work, just as his life also, a an excellent sort of training towards the life of much quiet delicacy and indepen- things of art and poetry. It begets in dence, might easily be placed in a false those who, coming across him in youth, focus, and made to appear a somewhat can bear him at all, a habit of reading betame theme in illustration of the more tween the lines, a faith in the effect of obvious parochial virtues. And those concentration and collectedness of mind who wish to understand his influence, in the right appreciation of poetry, an and experience his peculiar savour, must expectation of things in this order, combear with patience the presence of an 'ing to one in the way of a true discipline

of the temper as well as of the intellect. | with those pantheistic theories which He meets us with the promise that he have largely exercised men's minds in has much, and something very peculiar, to give us, if we will follow a certain difficult way, and seems to have the secret of a special and privileged state of mind. And those who have undergone his influence, and followed this difficult way, are like people who have passed through some initiation, a disciplina arcani, by submitting to which they became able constantly to distinguish in art, speech, feeling, manners, that which is organic, animated, expressive, from that which is only conventional, derivative, inexpressive.

some modern systems of philosophy; it is traceable even in the graver writings of historians; it makes as much difference between ancient and modern landscape as there is between the rough masks of an early mosaic and a portrait by Reynolds or Gainsborough. Of this new sense the writings of Wordsworth are the central and elementary expression; he is more simply and entirely occupied with it than any other. There was in his own character a certain contentment, a sort of religious placidity, seldom found united with a sensibility like his, which was favourable to the quiet, habitual observation of inanimate, or imperfectly animate, existence. His life of eighty years is not divided by profoundly felt incidents; its changes are almost wholly inward, and it falls into broad, untroubled spaces. What it most resembles is the life of one of those early Italian or Flemish painters, who just because their minds were full of heavenly visions, passed, some of them, the better part of sixty years in quiet, systematic industry. This placid life matured in him an unusual, innate sensibility to natural sights and sounds, the flower and its shadow on the stone, the cuckoo and its echo. The poem of Resolution and Inde

But although the necessity of selecting these precious morsels for oneself is an opportunity for the exercise of Wordsworth's peculiar influence, and induces a kind of just criticism and true estimate of them, yet the purely literary product would have been more excellent had the writer himself purged away that alien element. How perfect would have been the little treasury shut between the covers of how thin a book! Let us suppose the desired separation made, the electric thread untwined, the golden pieces, great and small, lying apart together. What are the peculiarities of this residue? What special sense does Wordsworth exercise, and what instincts does he satisfy? What are the subjects and the motives which in him excite the imagina-pendence is a storehouse of such images; tive faculty? What are the qualities in things and persons which he values, the impression and sense of which he can convey to others in an extraordinary way? An intimate consciousness of the expression of natural things, which weighs, listens, penetrates, where the earlier mind passed roughly by, is a large element in the complexion of modern poetry. It has been remarked again and again; it reveals itself in many forms, but is strongest and most attractive in what is strongest and most attractive in modern literature; it is exemplified almost equally by writers as unlike each other as Senancour and Théophile Gautier; as a singular chapter in the history of the human mind, its growth might be Subtle and sharp as he is in the outlining traced from Rousseau to Chateaubriand, of visible imagery, he is most subtle and from Chateaubriand to Victor Hugo; it delicate of all in the noting of sounds; has doubtless some latent connection so that he conceives of noble sound as

for its fulness of imagery it may be com-
pared to Keats's Saint Agnes' Eve. To
read one of his longer pastoral poems
for the first time is like a day spent in a
new country; the memory is crowded for
a time with precise and vivid images: -
The pliant harebell swinging in the breeze
On some grey rock;

The single sheep and the one blasted tree
And the bleak music from that old stone
wall;

In the meadows and the lower ground
Was all the sweetness of a common dawn;
And that green corn all day is rustling in thine

ears.

sions of eye and ear, and was at bottom a kind of sensuousness. At least it is only in a temperament exceptionally susceptible on the sensuous side that this

things comes to be so large a part of life. That he awakened "a sort of thought in sense" is Shelley's just criticism of this element in Wordsworth's poetry.

even moulding the human countenance to this power of seeing life, this perception nobler types, and as something actually of a soul, in inanimate things, came of an "profaned by visible form or image." exceptional susceptibility to the impresHe has a power likewise of realizing and conveying to the consciousness of the reader abstract and elementary impressions, silence, darkness, absolute motionlessness; or, again, the whole complex sense of the expressiveness of outward sentiment of a particular place, the abstract expression of desolation in the long white road, of peacefulness in a particular folding of the hills. In the airy building of the brain, a special day or hour even, comes to have for him a sort of personal identity, a spirit or angel given to it, by which, for its exceptional insight, or the happy light upon it, it has a presence in one's history, and acts there as a separate power or accomplishment; and he has celebrated in many of his poems the "efficacious spirit" which, as he says, resides in these "particular spots" of time.

earth, has sometimes seemed to degrade those who are subject to its influence, as if it did but reinforce that physical connection of our nature with the actual lime and clay of the soil, which is always drawing us nearer to our end. But for

And it was through nature thus ennobled by a semblance of passion and thought that he approached the spectacle of human life. Human life indeed is, at first, but an additional, accidental grace on this expressive landscape. When he thought of man, it was of man as in the presence and under the influence of these effective natural objects, and linked to them by many associations. The close That sense of a life in natural objects, connection of man with natural objects, which in most poetry is only a rhetorical the habitual association of his thoughts artifice, is in Wordsworth the assertion and feelings with a particular spot of of what for him is almost literal fact. To him every natural object seemed to possess more or less of a moral or spiritual life, to be capable of a companionship with man full of finesse and expression, of inexplicable affinities and subtle secrets of intercourse. An emanation, a Wordsworth these influences tended to particular spirit, belonged not to the moving leaves or water only, but to the distant peak arising suddenly by some change or perspective above the nearer horizon, to the passing space of light across the plain, to the lichened Druid stone even, for a certain weird fellowship in it with the moods of men. It was like a" survival" in him of that primitive condition, which some philosophers have traced in the history of human culture, in which all outward objects alike, even Religious sentiment, consecrating the the works of men's hands, were believed affections and regrets of the human heart, to be endowed with life and animation, above all that pitiful care and awe for the and the world was full of souls; that perishing human clay, of which relic-wormood in which the old Greek gods were ship is but the corruption, has always had first begotten, and which had many much to do with localities, with the strange aftergrowths. In the early ages thoughts which attach themselves to acthis belief, delightful as its effects in tual scenes and places. What is true of poetry often are, was but the result of a it everywhere, is truest of it in those secrude intelligence. But in Wordsworth cluded valleys where one generation

the dignity of human nature, because they tended to tranquillize it. He raises nature to the level of human thought to give it power and expression; he subdues man to the level of nature, and gives him thereby a certain breadth and coolness and solemnity. The leechgatherer on the moor, the woman stepping westward, are for him natural objects, almost in the same sense as the aged thorn, or the lichened rock on the heath.