The Bridling of Pegasus: Prose Papers on Poetry

I have spoken lightly of Wordsworthians: and if we are to get Wordsworth recognised by the public and by the world, we must recommend him not in the spirit of a clique, but in the spirit of disinterested lovers of poetry. But I am a Wordsworthian myself. I can read with pleasure and edification Peter Bell, and the whole series of Ecclesiastical Sonnets, and the addresses to Mr. Wilkinson’s spade, and even the Thanksgiving Ode; everything of Wordsworth, I think, except Vaudracour and Julia. It is not for nothing that one has been brought up in the veneration of a man so truly worthy of homage; that one has seen and heard him, lived in his neighbourhood, and been familiar with his country.

Alas! even the best of us are mortal; and we accept this graceful passage as Mr. Arnold’s confession that he, too, is a Wordsworthian against whom we must be on our guard. An extremist of a school he could not now be; but “it is not for nothing,” as he says, that he was trained in it. “Once a priest,” says an Italian proverb, “always a priest”; and, we fear, once a Wordsworthian, always a Wordsworthian. It is no reproach; but “we must be on our guard.” For our part, we are tolerably familiar with Wordsworth’s country, but, beyond that, we are under no such spell as Mr. Arnold confesses to above. We entertain profound veneration and homage for Wordsworth, but it is the result, not so much of early teaching – the most difficult of all lessons to unlearn – as of independent admiration and sympathy inspired in riper years. We, too, can read Peter Bell and the Ecclesiastical Sonnets, but with more edification than pleasure; and we have read, afresh, every word of what Mr. Arnold has included in his Poems of Wordsworth, only to reach the conclusion we have already stated, that from many, only too many of them, the spirit, the essence, the indefinable something, of poetry is absent.

We should be sorry to be thought guilty of dogmatism, and there is always peril in generalisations. Let us therefore descend to particulars, as far as space will permit, and analyse the contents of Mr. Arnold’s Poems of Wordsworth. The volume consists of 317 pages; of which 20 are dedicated to “Poems of Ballad Form,” 92 to “Narrative Poems,” 56 to “Lyrical Poems,” 34 to “Poems akin to the Antique and Odes,” 32 to “Sonnets,” and 83 to “Reflective and Elegiac Poems.”

In the first division, We are Seven, Lucy Gray, and The Reverie of Poor Susan, are the only poems that can be pronounced wholly satisfactory, and that give real pleasure. Anecdote for Fathers and Alice Fell would be just as well away, for they would raise the reputation of no poet, save it be with those against whom “we must be on our guard.” The poems, The Childless Father, Power of Music, and Star-Gazers, are redeemed only by their moral; and perhaps of Power of Music, even this cannot be said.

An Orpheus! an Orpheus! – yes, Faith may grow bold,And take to herself all the wonders of old; —Near the stately Pantheon you’ll meet with the sameIn the street that from Oxford hath borrowed its name.His station is there; – and he works on the crowd,He sways them with harmony merry and loud;He fills with his power all their hearts to the brim —Was aught ever heard like his Fiddle and him?What an eager assembly! what an empire is this!The weary have life, and the hungry have bliss;The mourner is cheered, and the anxious have rest;And the guilt-burthened soul is no longer opprest.

Then follow eight stanzas, in which the baker, the apprentice, the newsman, the lamplighter, the porter, the lass with her barrow, the cripple, the mother, and others, are described as stopping to listen, in language similar to that of the three stanzas we have quoted; the only slight improvement upon it being such lines as “She sees the Musician, ’tis all that she sees,” until we reach the conclusion:

Now, coaches and chariots! roar on like a stream;Here are twenty souls happy as souls in a dream:They are deaf to your murmurs, they care not for you,Nor what ye are flying, nor what ye pursue.

The more ardent admirers of Wordsworth are in the habit of assuming that those persons who approach their favourite poet with a more hesitating homage, fail to appreciate the beauty of simplicity, and fancy that a composition is not poetical because it lacks what is called elevation of language and the “grand style.” We can assure them, in all sincerity, that far from that being the basis of our inability to admire all that they admire, we admire Wordsworth most, and we admire him immensely, when he is as simple as it is possible to be. We have just cited a poem, which we scarcely think deserves that name. But, side by side with it, in Mr. Arnold’s volume, is a much shorter composition, on precisely the same theme, which is, if possible, still more simple in treatment, but which is true poetry, if true poetry was ever written. It is called The Reverie of Poor Susan:

At the corner of Wood Street, when daylight appears,Hangs a thrush that sings loud, it has sung for three years:Poor Susan has passed by the spot, and has heardIn the silence of morning the song of the Bird.’Tis a note of enchantment; what ails her? She seesA mountain ascending, a vision of trees;Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide,And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside.Green pastures she views in the midst of the dale,Down which she so often has tripped with her pail;And a single small cottage, a nest like a dove’s,The one only dwelling on earth that she loves.She looks, and her heart is in heaven; but they fade,The mist and the river, the hill and the shade:The stream will not flow, and the hill will not rise,And the colours have all passed away from her eyes.

After reading The Reverie of Poor Susan, we may pay Wordsworth’s Muse the compliment that was paid by the Latin poet to the woman who was simplex munditiis. Its neat simplicity is in great measure the secret of its success; but it is not mean in its simplicity. Neither, as in the other poems we have contrasted with it, have we to wait till the end of the poem for the moral and the meaning. The moral is interwoven and interfused with it, and every line breathes the soul and essence of the entire composition. But nearly all these “Poems of Ballad Form” are didactic; and does not Mr. Arnold tell us, in his preface, “Some kinds of poetry are in themselves lower kinds than others; the ballad kind is a lower kind; the didactic kind, still more, is a lower kind”? Of the twenty pages of these poems of lower kind, we are strongly disposed to think that the “disinterested lover of poetry” would discard twelve, and retain only eight, and that Wordsworth, to use Mr. Arnold’s phrase, would “stand higher” if this were done.

But even this proportion between retention and rejection cannot well be maintained by the disinterested lover of poetry as he advances through the volume. The “Narrative Poems” occupy nearly a third of it, and in this section the amount of real poetry is meagre indeed. We had no conception how many short poems Wordsworth had written, unredeemed by “the gleam, the light that never was, on sea or land,” till we read this collection consecutively; and we read it in the open air, in a beautiful country, on the loveliest day of a lovely May. But nothing could possibly attune the heart of the disinterested lover of poetry to such verses as these:

When Ruth was left half desolate,Her father took another mate;And Ruth, not seven years old,A slighted child, at her own willWent wandering over dale and hill,In thoughtless freedom, bold.There came a Youth from Georgia’s shore —A military casque he wore,With splendid feathers drest;He brought them from the Cherokees;The feathers nodded in the breeze,And made a gallant crest.“Belovèd Ruth!” No more he said.The wakeful Ruth at midnight shedA solitary tear:She thought again – and did agreeWith him to sail across the sea,And drive the flying deer.“And now, as fitting is and right,We in the Church our faith will plight,A husband and a wife.”Even so they did; and I may sayThat to sweet Ruth that happy dayWas more than human life.

Not only is it impossible, we think, for the disinterested lover of poetry to read this either with pleasure or with edification, but it is not easy for him to read it without an ever-broadening smile. As a rule, the verse to be met with in our less fastidious Magazines is not of a very high order. But we doubt if the editor of any one of them would consent to insert the foregoing stanzas, or those that follow, with their, “But as you have before been told,” “Meanwhile, as thus with him it fared, They for the voyage were prepared,” “God help thee, Ruth! Such pains she had, That she in half a year was mad,” and such like specimens of unartistic and naive childishness. Surely, if there be any one who thinks this poetry, it must be Mr. Arnold’s friend, the British Philistine? If Murdstone and Quinion could be converted and ever took to reading poetry, would not this be the sort of verse that would delight them? And would they not do so by reason of that “stunted sense of beauty,” and that “defective type” of intellect with which Mr. Arnold justly reproaches the English middle-class?

Did these poems stand alone, in their prosaic puerility, we might be surprised that Mr. Arnold had reproduced them; but we should have been content to conclude that, like Homer, both poet and editor had been nodding. But we turn page after page of these “Narrative Poems” to be astonished by what we encounter. The next poem to Ruth is Simon Lee: The Old Huntsman, with an Incident in which he was Concerned:

Few months of life has he in store,As he to you will tell,For still, the more he works, the moreDo his weak ankles swell.My gentle Reader, I perceiveHow patiently you’ve waited,And now I fear that you’ll expectSome tale will be related.O Reader! had you in your mindSuch stores as silent thought can bring,O gentle Reader! you would findA tale in everything.What more I have to say is short,And you must kindly take it:It is no tale; but, should you think,Perhaps a tale you’ll make it.

Simon is grubbing the stump of a tree, but was unequal to the task. The poet takes the mattock from his hand, and with a blow severs the root, “At which the poor Old Man so long, And vainly had endeavoured.” Thankful tears come into his eyes, whereupon the poet remarks:

I’ve heard of hearts unkind, kind deedsWith coldness still returning;Alas! the gratitude of menHath oftener left me mourning.

The sentiment is nice and pretty, but is it poetry, or, even if it were, could it make poetry of the doggerel – for surely there really is no other name for it – that precedes it? And do Wordsworthians against whom Mr. Arnold tells us we ought to be on our guard, or Wordsworthians who fancy that we need not be on our guard against them, suppose that moralising correctly and piously in verse about every “incident” in which somebody happens to be “concerned,” renders the narrative a “tale,” – much more, makes poetry of it? We are far from saying that Wordsworth might not, in a happier mood, have written poetry upon this particular incident. But we do say, with some confidence, that he has unfortunately not done so; that the incident, narrated in the manner in which he has narrated it, cannot of itself be accepted as poetry – which, as Mr. Arnold well knows, is the extreme Wordsworthian theory, as advocated by Wordsworth himself in pages upon pages of controversial prose; and that we are greatly astonished Mr. Arnold should indirectly lend it countenance, by reprinting and stamping with his precious approval, such infelicitous triviality as the above. We cannot shrink from saying this, through an unworthy dread lest we should be confounded with “the tenth-rate critics and compilers to whom it is still permissible to speak of Wordsworth’s poetry, not only with ignorance, but with impertinence.” Mr. Arnold has himself shown that he does not hesitate to speak in pretty strong terms of those portions of Wordsworth’s verse which he does not regard as poetry. He describes them as “abstract verbiage”; he acknowledges that they are so inferior, it seems wonderful how Wordsworth should have produced them; and in a passage delightfully humorous he imagines a long passage of Wordsworth being declaimed at a Social Science Congress to an admiring audience of men with bald heads and women in spectacles, “and in the soul of any poor child of nature who may have wandered in thither, an unutterable sense of lamentation, mourning, and woe.”

All that we ask, therefore, is to be allowed the same amount of liberty which Mr. Arnold himself has exercised, and to be permitted to do what he has done. We, too, would fain disengage what is valuable in Wordsworth’s poetry from what is worthless. We, too, would fain “exhibit his best work, and clear away obstructions from around it.” But we contend, and we willingly leave the decision to disinterested lovers of poetry, that such poems as Ruth and Simon Lee are not only not Wordsworth’s best work, but not good work at all; on the contrary are part of the obstruction from which it should be cleared.

The next two poems in the “Narrative” section refer to the fidelity of dogs, and a single stanza will suffice to show that they are of much the same calibre as the two that precede them:

But hear a wonder for whose sakeThis lamentable tale I tell!A lasting monument of wordsThis wonder merits well.The Dog, which still was hovering nigh,Repeating the same timid cry,This Dog, had been through three months’ spaceA dweller in that savage place.

Next in order comes Hart-Leap Well, which consists of two parts. In the first we come across such lines and phrases as “Joy sparkled in the prancing courser’s eyes,” “A rout that made the echoes roar,” “Soon did the Knight perform what he had said, And far and wide thereof the fame did ring,” “But there is matter for a second rhyme, And I to this would add another tale,” which are simply a distress to the disinterested reader of poetry. In the second part, the poet warms up, and ends with a passage which is very beautiful:

Grey-headed Shepherd, thou hast spoken well;Small difference lies between thy creed and mine:This Beast not unobserved by Nature fell;His death was mourned by sympathy divine.The Being, that is in the clouds and air,That is in the green leaves among the groves,Maintains a deep and reverential careFor the unoffending creatures whom he loves.The Pleasure-house is dust: – behind, before,This is no common waste, no common gloom;But Nature, in due course of time, once moreShall here put on her beauty and her bloom.She leaves these objects to a slow decay,That what we are, and have been, may be known;But, at the coming of the milder day,These monuments shall all be overgrown!One lesson, Shepherd, let us two divide,Taught both by what she shows, and what conceals;Never to blend our pleasure or our prideWith sorrow of the meanest thing that feels.

Of course, this is poetry, and very good poetry; and it is, justly, one of the favourite passages of ardent admirers of Wordsworth. But we can scarcely refrain from saying that, good as it is, there exists something of precisely the same kind, and, as it happens, in precisely the same metre, which is considerably better. Surely, no one will have any difficulty in naming it. It is Gray’s famous Elegy. Yet we remember how indignant the “Wordsworthians against whom we ought to be on our guard” were with the Quarterly Review, because there appeared in it a paper in which Wordsworth and Gray were compared. To mention them in the same breath was sacrilege! We do not wish to affirm that the disinterested lover of poetry believes Gray ever to have scaled the heights where Wordsworth’s wing sometimes floats almost without effort. But it cannot be uninteresting to mark that, in what we may call the middle notes, Wordsworth is distinctly inferior to Gray, though ever and anon his voice gets entirely beyond Gray’s compass.

It would be impossible, with any regard for space, to quote from, or even to name, every poem reproduced by Mr. Arnold, which in our opinion would have been better suppressed. But if we seem to have established our contention so far, we think the reader may rely upon it that he would more or less concur in what else might be said on this score. The Force of Prayer, The Affliction of Margaret, The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman, are little if any less trivial than the poems already condemned; while in The Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle, we read six pages equally poor and unpoetical, suddenly to come upon such a quatrain as the following:

Love had he found in huts where poor men lie;His daily teachers had been woods and rills,The silence that is in the starry sky,The sleep that is among the lonely hills.

The last two lines it would be impossible to praise too highly. Only the silence of profound reverence can do them justice. They are touches like these, touches like “the harvest of a quiet eye,” that give to Wordsworth his holy predominance, and whatever predominance, after fair examination, must be adjudged him. But how few they are! Perhaps it is in the nature of things that they should be so. But being so few and far between, they cannot fill up the blank that intervenes. They are indeed “Angels’ visits.” But even poetry has to do mainly with human guests, and a poet must be judged, as Mr. Arnold truly affirms, by “the ample body of powerful work” he leaves behind. We cannot assume that much of Wordsworth’s poetry is not unutterably bad, because some of it is unutterably beautiful. The utmost we can do is to grant, concerning him, what he himself said so finely of a young girl:

If thou appear’st untouched by solemn thought,Thy nature is not therefore less divine:Thou liest in Abraham’s bosom all the year,And worshipp’st at the Temple’s inner shrine,God being with thee when we know it not.

It is possible that like the “dear child, dear girl,” he lay in Abraham’s bosom “all the year,” but he communicates the fact, he impresses us with the fact, but seldom. As a rule, he seems to be outside the Temple altogether. Hence these magnificent bursts of poetical depth and sublimity, which, be it said, are peculiar to Wordsworth, are mere short passages, and there are not many of them. But if they suffice, after a complete survey of the works of both poets, to place Wordsworth above Byron, we shall be obliged to conclude that they suffice to place him above every poet that ever lived. That such a theory of poetry, such a canon of criticism is untenable, unless we are to cast every hitherto accepted theory of poetry and every former canon of criticism to the winds, we trust, in due course, to be able to establish.

We are aware that The Brothers is a favourite composition with thoroughgoing Wordsworthians. But as we have been told to be on our guard against them, we need not hesitate to say that it seems to us to consist of very ordinary verse, and the piece itself to be devoid of any real poetical temperament, though it fills sixteen pages in Mr. Arnold’s collection. Sixteen more are occupied by Margaret, upon which we are unable to pronounce a different or a modified verdict. Both abound in such passages as the following:

He left his house: two wretched days had past,And on the third, as wistfully she raisedHer head from off her pillow, to look forth,Like one in trouble, for returning light,Within her chamber-casement she espiedA folded paper, lying as if placedTo meet her waking eyes. This tremblinglyShe opened – found no writing, but beheldPieces of money carefully enclosed,Silver and gold. “I shuddered at the sight,”Said Margaret, “for I knew it was his handWhich placed it there: and ere that day was ended,That long and anxious day! I learned from oneSent hither by my husband to impartThe heavy news, – that he had joined a TroopOf soldiers, going to a distant land.He left me thus – he could not gather heartTo take a farewell of me; for he fearedThat I should follow with my Babes, and sinkBeneath the misery of that wandering life.”

If this be poetry, then poetry is very easily written, and what has hitherto been supposed to be the highest, the most difficult, and the rarest, of the arts, presents no more difficulty to the person who knows how to write at all than the simplest, baldest, and most unartistic prose. What, for instance, is this? —

At length the expected letter from the kinsman came, with kind assurances that he would do his utmost for the welfare of the boy; to which requests were added that forthwith he might be sent to him. Ten times or more the letter was read over. Isabel went forth to show it to the neighbours round; nor was there at that time on English land a prouder heart than Luke’s. When Isabel had to her house returned, the old man said, “He shall depart to-morrow.” To this word the housewife answered, talking much of things which, if at such short notice he should go, would surely be forgotten. But at length she gave consent, and Michael was at ease.

Is this prose or verse? We have printed it as prose. Wordsworth wrote it as verse, and Mr. Arnold has reproduced it as poetry. Had all Wordsworth’s compositions been of this calibre, and a painfully large number of them are, well might John Stuart Mill affirm that any man of good abilities might become as good a poet as Wordsworth by giving his mind to it, and we will add that a man of good abilities could hardly employ them worse. Yet this passage, and fourteen pages of verse not one whit better than it, are to be met with in Michael, one of the narrative poems Mr. Arnold, with special emphasis, begs us to admire. “The right sort of verse,” he says, “to choose from Wordsworth, if we are to seize his true and most characteristic form of expression, is a line like this from Michael:

And never lifted up a single stone.

There is nothing subtle in it, no heightening, no study of poetic style, strictly so called; yet it is expressive of the highest and most expressive kind.” Of course, in order to properly appreciate it, we must know the context, which fortunately is easily compressed. Michael and his son Luke were to build a sheepfold; but, as told in the passage we have printed, Luke is sent to a kinsman, who will advance him in life. Before he goes, Michael takes him to lay the first stone of the sheepfold. The lad then leaves home, falls into dissolute courses, and at last hides himself beyond the seas. After that, it is narrated of Michael:

And to that hollow dell from time to timeDid he repair, to build the Fold of whichHis flock had need. ’Tis not forgotten yetThe pity which was then in every heartFor the Old Man – and ’tis believed by allThat many and many a day he thither went,And never lifted up a single stone.

We have asked several disinterested lovers of poetry, some of them ardent admirers of Wordsworth, what they think of this; and we are bound to say that most of them failed to see anything in it whatsoever. That is not our case. We feel the force of the situation, and the apt simplicity of the concluding line. Yet repeat it, dwell on it, and surrender ourselves to it as we will, we fail to persuade ourselves that it merits the lofty eulogy pronounced on it by Mr. Arnold. It is with hesitation that we presume, on such a point, and where the issue is so direct, to place our opinion in seeming competition with his; but we can only leave the decision to the communis sensus of disinterested lovers of poetry. But nothing – not even Mr. Arnold’s authority – could satisfy us that this line suffices to lend the wings of poetry to fourteen closely printed pages of such pedestrian verse as that of which Michael for the most part consists.

The only other poem in the “Narrative” section of the volume is The Leech-Gatherer; and it, besides containing many lines of admirable poetry, is itself a coherently beautiful poem. But when, resuming our analysis, we enquire how much poetry there is in the 112 pages, or in more than the third portion of the volume we have as yet examined, what do we find? Exactly 20, and only 20, which we honestly believe the disinterested lover of poetry, the critic to whom Mr. Arnold makes appeal, would recognise as strictly deserving that description. We can seriously assert that this is the amount we should save from the wreck, if we were editing a selection from Wordsworth, were disengaging his good work from his bad, and were seeking to obtain for him readers who care nothing whatever about him personally, and who only wish ever and anon to steep themselves in the atmosphere of native and sterling poetry. We are well aware that, from another and a more extended point of view, Wordsworth never wrote a line, in verse or in prose, which is not worth preserving, and worth reading. But that is not at present the question. We are dealing with the critical contention of a great and influential critic, that “what strikes me with admiration, what establishes in my opinion Wordsworth’s superiority” – to Byron, be it understood, and to every English poet since Milton – “is the great and ample body of powerful work which remains to him, even after all his inferior work has been cleared away.” This it is which renders it necessary to clear away the inferior work, in order that we may see if the body of “powerful” work that remains be really “ample” or not.