PRIMITIVISM IN WORDSWORTH'S
EARLY POETRY

Thai: for flu Dog". of M. A.
MICHIGAN STATE COLLEGE

Norma Byrd Smith
1949

This is to certify that the

thesis entitled

PRIMITIVISM IN WORDSWORTH' S EARLY POETRY

presented by

Norma Byrd Smith

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for

Ldegree in E 1131‘

MM;

Major professor

Dam August 26, 1949

 

 

PRIMITIVISM IN WORDSWORTH'S EARLY POETRY

I

By

Norma Byrd Smith

A THESIS

Submitted_to the Graduate School of Michigan
State College of Agriculture and Applied
Science in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS
Department or English

1949

PREFACE

Since my first acquaintance with English literature.
Wordsworth has been my favorite poet. Because I had lived
in the country for the first thirteen years of my life, when
I became a student in the city high school. I felt that I. i
of all the students. "understood" Wordsworth. for I had lived
close to Nature and was familiar with the things he talked
about. As years go by, I am glad for my early interest in
this poet. although now I realize that it was only interest
and not true appreciation and understanding. Since that
time, I have tried more and more to understand his poetry.

The purpose of this study is only another of many at-
tempts at understanding more of Wordsworth‘s poetry. Here,

I shall attempt to show that a part of the philosophy he
held during his most formative years-~1797-1807--can be con-
sidered as primitivism. .

Although many authors intimate the possibility of link-
ing some of Wordsworth's ideas to primitivism, Irving babbitt
is the only one I have found who has written specifically on
the subject, and that only a short article in a periodical.

Therefore, it was necessary first to study primitivism
in general. and the great many good works which have been
done on this subject--by Lovedoy and Boas. Whitney. and Fitz-
gerald especially. Then I searched all the poetry of Words-

worth written before 1807 for evidences of the different

2.1.8349

ii

types of primitivism. It is possible that Wordsworth himself
would not have considered his ideas primitivistic, even in
the early period. I can only show that portions of his poe-
try may display evidences of primitivism. as the term is now
used.

I shall also attempt to show the ideas which.Wordsworth
and Rousseau had in common. Again, I shall not attempt to
trace a direct stream of influence from the eighteenth cen-
tury French writer. It is. nevertheless, interesting to
speculate about this influence.

With a few exceptions. this study is limited to the works
and the life of Wordsworth up to 1807. Students of the poet
will realize the reason for this--the great change in ideas
and beliefs which was manifested in the poet in the ensuing
years. This study is not concerned with biographical facts.
however, except as they influence the poetry.

The French Revolution, it is supposed. made Wordsworth
a great poet; and he continued to be a great poet so long as
he drew inspiration from the Revolutionary Idea. It is per-
haps a question whether'critics of Wordsworth have not become
somewhat too habituated to seeing all things in the French
Revolution, and perhaps too much habituated to interpreting
literature generally by political and.socia1 environment.
Undoubtedly. werdsworth.was deeply influenced by the French
Revolution. And to understand the nature of this influence

is a primary duty of the student of Wordsworth. But. since

iii

I feel that the many books on the subject have more than
taken care of it sufficiently, I shall take for granted a
knowledge of this period in his life and touch on it only in
passing.

I do not feel that it is necessary to give the exact re-
ference for the famous quotations which are familiar to all
readers of Wordsworth. However, the specific reference is
given for most excerpts. Also. in this specific reference.
wherever the letter A appears before the lines, this refer-
ence is taken from the 1805 edition of Th2 Prelude. as edited
by Ernest de Selincourt. with which most students of Words-
worth are familiar.

I do not intend that this should be an entirely origi-
nal piece of work. Moreover. I am indeed grateful for.the
many interesting and helpful studies of Wordsworth from which
I have been able to draw. And. although I have done much in-
tensive work with the poetry itself. I do not present this
as an exhaustive study.

I wish to express my appreciation and gratitude to the
following people: to Dr, Branford P. Millar. my major pro-
fessor. for his invaluable suggestions and criticisms; to Dr.
Anders Orbeck. for his continued inspiration; to Dr. C. C.
Hamilton and Dr. Claude Newlin, for their suggestions and
help; and to Dr. William L. Watson and my family for their

faith in my ability to complete the work.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE
I. INTRODUCTION 1
The Problem of Wordsworth Scholarship 1

Types of Primitivism 3
Chronological Primitivism 3

Cultural Primitivism 8

II. CHRONOLOGICAL PRIMITIVISM IN WORDSWORTH 15
III. CULTURAL PRIMITIVISM IN WORDSWORTH 2?

Preference of Country Life to City Life 27

The Rural Folk 39
Idiots and Crazy People 51
Childhood and the Child of Nature 56
Anti-intellectualism 69
IV. WORDSWORTH AND ROUSSEAU 78

V. WORDSWORTH AND THE NOBLE SAVAGE TRADITION 93
VI. CONCLUSION 100
BIBLIOGRAPHY 112

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
The Problem of Wordsworth Scholarship

“An acquaintance with the mental and spiritual develop-
ment of a poet is necessary for the fullest understanding
and appreciation of his work. This is doubtless true of all
poets. but it is pre-eminently true of Wordsworth.'1 No one
familiar with his poetry will deny its subjective quality.
His poetry is a mirror of his personal experiences, and his
feelings, imaginings. and thoughts reflected there. App-
reciation commonly follows understanding. and Wordsworth is
not an easy poet to understand. "No poet. perhaps. can be
easy who is so essentially and pervasively subjective.'2 At
best. one can only try to understand certain portions of his
best work.

Wordsworth began writing poetry. like most other good
posts, at the age of fourteen. But, unlike most poets. he
continued the practice of it for no less than sixty-six
years afterwards. In so doing, he set for the world one of
the greatest problems of any poet, for he was not only a
poet of great scape and diversity. but a poet in which there

is extreme conflict in thought between the early and the

 

p. l.

2 H. W. Garrod, Wordsworth, p.11.

later years. Since most of his poetry is subjective, this
conflict of thought and change in ideas appears in his poe-
try.

Any attempt to force all of Wordsworth's poetry into
a consistent whole is. according to Helvin Rader. "simply
an effort at mmtilation. Once we have recognized the diver-
sity of his poetry. we can more readily correlate his
growth.'3

Yet, “nearly everything by which'Wordsworth is supreme
was written in a single decade of his life. in the period
between 1797 and 1807. Outside these limits he wrote. of
course. much that was interesting; but almost nothing that
could bring him into the very first rank of poets, almost
nothing that was of a piece with the splendid achievement

of the decas mirabilis."

 

In this study, therefore. I am interested primarily in
that poetry written before 1807, and moreover. only in that
part of his philosophy during those years which can be de-
fined as primitivism.5

 

3 Kelvin Rader, The Presiding Ideas ip‘Wordsworth'g Poetr ,

p.128.
4 Garrod,‘Wordsworth. p.11.

5 This idea is held by Irving Babbitt in "The Primitivism
of Wordsworth." Bookman (U. S. A.) . LXXIV. (1931). 3.

Primitivism

"Primitivism is the exaltation of a state of life in
which man depends on his natural powers exerted in a simple
society and an uncomplicated environment, rather than on a
high degree of training and on an environment greatly mod-
ified bv civilization. Primitivism thus presupposes some
form of the theory of man's natural goodness, whether this
be taken to reside in instinct, common sense, Spontaneous
feeling, or in some or all these."6 To be primitivistic,
such a view of human nature must be connected with a stage
or phase of human life different from that i: which the
person lives--whether in the past or in some contemporary
society.

"From Hesiod to Miniver Cheevey many men have thought
or have pretended to think, that their happiest days were
in the past."7 The man in the street calls that longing,
"regret for the good old days," the philosopher terms it
"chronological primitivism," a name first given to it by

A, O. Lovejoy in his Documentapy History g3 Primitivism and

 

 

figlated Ideas.8 But named or unnamed, the tendencv is a

 

constant one in human nature.

 

5 A, D. Mckillop, English Literature from Dryden pg burns,
p. 361.

 

7 Margaret Fitzgerald, First Follow Nature, p. 8.

 

 

8 Vol. I: ‘Primitivism and Related Ideas 3p Antiouity, p. l.

 

 

Any form of primitivism implies that man may, must or
does grow worse. In chronological primitivism, while man
as originally created with all his faculties unimpaired and
uncorrupted was capable of knowing divine truth and natur-
ally inclined to follow it, ”he has now so degenerated as
to need either intellectual regeneration or, according to
the orthodox Opponents of deism, the special help of reve-
lation."9

The poets' additions to the long tradition of primitiv-
ism blend easily into its venerable conventionality. "They
dreamed. as generations of writers before them had dreamed,
of the Classical Golden Age and of the lost beauty of Eden."10
Life and literature prompted their reminiscent lingings.
Memories of classical readings. recollections of Journeys
to Virgil's tomb and Horace's vine-crowned hills. the horrors
of men in England and of their generation for the degenerate
state of continental Europe-~all these were powerful motives
for lamenting the vanishing grandeur of Rome and Greece.

Of all regrets of by-gone days. the poets' longing for
past times of good government at home were most frequent and
most impassioned. But at least occasionally they meditated
also on the lost delights of Eden. regretted the Joys of the

patriarchal age. and criticized the evils of modern

 

9

lo Fitzgerald, 22' 2.1.3." p.3o

Christianity. They looked back to oden, not so much to de-
plore man's sins as to survey his pristine powers of intel-
lect. "Man exiled fron.Paradise had lost his perfect bal-
ance of reason and passion and had become a depraved crea-'
ture, a fugitive from the Creator, bereft of perfect love
and of heaven on earth."11 Some shadow of Aden's peace re-
mained with him in rural life, but most of the pleasures of
that vanished garden were delights never to return.

Among those lost blessi as, man's superior mental endos-
ments seen to have impresses the poets most. Thev remarked
the clarity of vision and calm of passion which ndam had
possessed before the fall--his simplicitv, his in ocence,
his iotuitive k owledre. hut that early perfection of hu-
manity had changed: in men's altered state his runaway pes-
sions rushed the individual and society toward ruin.

A far stronrer strain of chro clerical primitivism
finds empression in the poets' admiration for the classical
past. "The Golden Age of antiruitr had been a sunshinv era
wherein war was not, nor trade, nor commerce, nor wealth--a
halcyon period that had derenerated all too soon into an
iron are of avarice, cruelty, and conflict."12 Poets of all
times loved the Arcadian innocence and gentle unworldliness

of the Golden Age. Thev liked to recount its virtues, to

 

11 Ibid., p. 4.
12

 

remember that innocence and unselfish love marked the age
"when time was young," that then ”swains had no guile, and'
nymphs no greed. and mankind no ambition.'13

Nor did the poets confine their longing to legendary
‘ ages: for purposes of rousing degenerate moderns. memories
of the historically great served even better than regrets
for Arcadia. It was natural and conventional for such poets
to contrast their fellowmen with the giants of ancient times.
and to find their contemporaries wanting. Beyond question,
the ancients seemed wiser. sturdier. better than,their mod-
ern descendants. Reflections on the poor estate of modern
Greece and Rome inspired the most eloquent poetic laments
for the passing of ancient grandeur. Whether the plaint was
a melancholy gig'transit, or whether it was a warning to
Britain to guard her greatness. the theme was always one of
solemn import. Luxury and its attendant evils had ruined
both Greece and Bone. Was this to happen to England?

Stronger than aesthetic interest in a nebulous Golden
Age. more persistent than academic interest in the faded
days of Rome, was the poets' devotion to the glories of Eng-
land's past. "Ranging the centuries from Boadicea to Queen
Anne, the writers held up to contemporary English manners,
morals. politics, and literature the overpowering example

of Britain's former greatness.'14

 

15 Ibid.. p.10.
14 Ibido 9 p.21.

Modern learning and literature were decayed: men must
look to earlier days for examples of wisdom and genius. Not
only learning in general. but poetry in particular had be-
come debased.

On questions of manners, morals. and politics, "nostal-
gia for earlier, simpler, homespun times underlay their in-
patience with the pretty race of contemporary coxcombs, and
their resentment of the pert patter of contemporary man-
ners."15 Not in manners alone had Britain failed: her moral
decline was sadder than her fall from courtesy. Noblemen
were wicked, churchmen proud. all men avaricious: the virtue
of former days had given way to knavery and stupidity. The
poets who turned backward in their dreaming were but trying.
as men of every generation have tried, to forget present
griefs in visions of a golden past. Whether they looked to
the vales of Arcadia or to the England of Queen Anne, they
sought the same blessings--harmony, peace. virtue.

The impulse underlying primitivism is either the desire
to escape from a corrupt and sophisticated society. or the
desire to reform such an existing civilization by bringing
it into conformity with an ideal of virtuous simplicity.
When the poets began to look for harmony. peace. and virtue,
not in an earlier era. but in a different way of living.

their search for the good life among noble savages, rural

 

15 Ibid.. p.23.

swains. and country gentlemen added to the ever-widening
stream of primitivism another current--the current of cul-

tural primitivism.
Cultural Primitivism

"Cultural primitivism is the discontent of the civile

ized with civilization, or with some conspicuous and char-
acteristic feature of it. It is the belief of men living
in a relatively highly evolved and complex cultural condi-
tion that a life far simpler and less sophisticated in some
or all respects is a more desirable life.'16 The cultural
primitivist has almost invariably believed that the simpler
life of which he has dreamed has been somewhere, at some
time, actually lived by human beings. When these have been
conceived as having existed at the beginning of history, or
in a cycle of history, cultural primitivism fuses with one
of the forms of chronological primitivism. But the former
may be, and fairly often has been, disassociated from the
letter. In cultural primitivism. society deteriorates as
it grows more complex. ”Contemporary primitive peoples may
be taken to illustrate an early and desirable stage in the

7

life of the race."1 Above all. "the cultural primitivist's

 

16 A. O.'LoveJoy. 2p. cit.. p.7.

1" McKillop. 22. cit.. p.361.

model of human excellence and happiness is sought in the
present. in the mode of life of existing primitive. or so-
called 'savage,‘ peoples."18
Ian's desire to "get away from it all" motivates his
cultural primitivism. ”Periodically tiring of the complex-
ities of civilization, he dreams of a simpler way of life."19
The adventurous spirit longs for the pioneer days of rugged
frontiersmen, the timid soul for the sunlit safety of a South
Sea isle. One and all are attempting to accomplish the same
end--that is, to find a less intricate design for living.
“The early poets in English literature have little
to say about the noble savage or about hard and soft extremes
of life on foreign shores: they are content with such stock
themes as pastoral life. rural retirement. and the innate
superiority of the man of humble means."2o But when they
went far afield for their ideal modes of life. the poets
were torn between the delights of trOpic paradises and the
vigorous virtues of hardy arctic lands--down through a long
list of heroic qualities. The Laplanders' industry. sim-
plicity. honesty, and courage were typical of the virtues
which.lade men feel that a harsh and primitive life might

be an enviable one.'

 

18
LoveJoy, gp. cit.. p.8.

19 Fitzgerald, gp. cit.. p.28.

20 L000 Cite

10

Every urban society that becomes tired of its own so-
phistication turns longingly towards some ideal country of
peace and simplicity and natural beauty. ”Eighteenth-centu-
ry poets, writing from the noisy, smoke-filled London that
enchanted and exhausted them, deafened by the street cries
without, and the coffee-club chatter within, fled for mental
quiet to pictures of pleasant pastoral scenes that had no
counterpart in the reality of English rural life. The coun-
try swain of their pieces had an ideal existence. He
watched the progress of the spring, enjoyed the fragrant
breezes, and filled the country glades with his music.”31
He had health and innocence, a clear conscience, and a con-
tented life. The Joyous life of the shepherd was typical
of the happiness of other rural workers. And, in the poets'
description, at least, the country girl Spent her days ad-
miring the "smooth mirror of the crystal stream," and the
ploughman spent his whistling duets with the nightingales.

While noble savages, tropic paradises, arctic wastes,
and pastoral scenes might afford early eighteenth-century
poets glimpses of better ways of life, their favorite con-
cept of living was embodied in the ideal of rural retire-
ment. The poets had nothing to add to the classic theme
that wisdom and virtue are the fruits of a retired life.

 

21 Ibid., p. 41.

11

The noise of the city was only an external source of annoy-
ance. More serious still was the threat of urban living to
the virtuous life. Avarice, ambition, the pride of courts.
the scorn of the great, possessed the town. Town life was
a hurricane wherein conscience and peace were exchanged for
doubtful successes in society or statecraft. It was the
haunt of scandal and pride and hypocrisy.

“Of all the virtues which the town dwellers sought in-
country shades. perhaps the most eagerly looked for was
peace."22 A sensible man sought solitude himself and invited
his friends to share it. He was conscious of the tranquil-
lity and the security of country life.

Some poets went to the country for inspiration as well
as for comfort. “The poets' aesthetic appreciation of the
woodlands as the abode of the muses was far overshadowed by
their practical approval of the country as a refuge from
the discomforts of town life. They had not, most of them,
any intimate knowledge of the country life they praised, but
they had a varied and lengthy acquaintance with the urban
inconveniences they bewailed.”25

"Country gentlemen and retired sages led relatively un-

pretentious livee. but for a real model of day-toeday

 

22 Ibid., p.46.
25 Ibid., p.52.

V59-

 

l2

simplicity, the poets turned to their fellow-citizens--the
poor. Poverty (at least in theory) seemed admirable in its
freedom from inordinate desires. while wealth (again in the-
ory) seemed a burden, a heavy load of complex affairs and
overweening ambitions."24 If the posts were to be believed,
all virtuous poor folk were to be found in the country. Ex-
cept for the comparative lowliness of their station, there
was little to distinguish them from gentlemen in rural re-
tirement: they were peaceful and innocent-otheir virtues
were a lesson to the pride. ambition, and double dealing of
city people.

Of all types of praiseworthy poor. the country girl
easily I'won the palm“ for pepularity. -She was practical.
thrifty, prudent. wholesome. 'She spun. refrained from
cards and scandal. and loved sincerely without mercenary
motives.'25 She is born of honest parents. and though she
has no portion, she has a great deal of virtue-~the natural
sweetness and innocence of her behavior, the freshness of
her complexion. the unaffected turn of her shape and person.

While the impulse to primitivism always finds some ex-
pression in any age. several causes make it a prominent part

of modern literature. A growing philosophical emphasis on

self-evident common sense or reason, the "light of nature,“

 

13

weakened esteem for traditional authority and established
institutions. "And the great literature of travel which de-
veloped in the age of discovery often described happy peo-
ples in distant climes. so that cultural primitivism was en-
couraged and richly illustrated.'26

With higher standards of living and increased prosper-
ity. the propaganda against luxury often took a primitivis-
tic form. This might be Just a heightening of the impulse
that leads people to praise the simpler life of their fore-
fathers. or it might be extended to an attack on civilized
society.

Primitivism had thus won a decisive victory in the
eighteenth century. The earlier rationalism was found to
be unsatisfying: “above all, it did not satisfy man's deep-
seated craving for immediacy: so that presently he began to
turn for this immediacy and also. as he hoped. for wisdom.
to the region of impulse and emotion that lies beyond the
rational level."27

What this primitivistic tendency--to look for one's
illumination backwards and up--meant in the ease of Words-

worth has been excellently put by I. Legouis: I'li‘orth step

the ignorant and illiterate. whose senses. not yet distorted

 

2‘ McKillop. 22. cit., p.362.

27 Irving Babbitt, "The Primitivism of Wordsworth." Bookman
(U. s. A.), Lxxxv. (1931). p.3.

14

by analysis, yield them immediate perception of the world
. . . ; above all, children, still half enve10ped in the
mystery which is the origin of every creature. . . But the
train of those restored to honor is not yet ended. There
follow those in whom.all purely intellectual light appears
extinct-~the crazy and the idiotic, to whom the common
people, perhaps not wrongly, attribute inepiration, and
from whom even the wise may learn much, for none can say
beforehand what phrase will issue from their lips; and
since the utter impotence of so-called rational beings is
admitted, may it not be that these will presently let
fall words not less profound than mysterious? , . , Shall
the multitudes which the philosophy of a Descartes would
proscribe, the animals which can ot reason, be set aside
on account of so insignificant a deficiency?. They pos-
sess instinct. . . Nor is even this enough. Plants also
have their joys and sorrows; they live and feel; they
speak a language which the poet should strive to under-
stand and interpret."28

Wordsworth, I believe, often combined the two types
of primitivism. He felt that man, in his day of science,
intellectualism, and industrialism, had degenerated from
some previously happy state, and, also, that it was in
the man closest to nature, the rustic folk, that one

.finds the real man.

 

28 Emile Legouis, The Early 9333 3: William Wordsworth, pp.
401-402.

 

 

CHAPTER I I
CHRONOLOGICAL PRIMITIVISM IN WORDSWORTH

There can be no doubt that Wordsworth believed that
man had degenerated down through the years--that he was no
longer as good as he once was--and often

much it grieved my heart to think
What man has made of man.

In a letter written to Robert Southey in 1805, he said:

Oh! it makes the heart groan, that, with such
a beautiful world as this to live in. and such
a soul as that of Man's is by nature and by
gift of God, we should go about on such errands
as we do, destroying and laying waste: and
ninety-nine of us in a hundred never easy in
any rgad that travels toward peace and quiet-
ness.

From 1802-1807 especially he wrote poems which evince
a deep interest in the political and sOCial events of his
time. And not only political. but social, conditions dis-
turbed him, especially as they existed in England. In the
famous sonnet “The world is too much with us," he enters a
protest against the preoccupation with social and business
cares. and the indifference to the resources which Nature
offers to the human spirit:

The world is too much with us: late and soon.

Getting and spending. we lay waste our powers:

Little we see in Nature that is ours:
We have given our hearts away. a sordid boon!

 

1 “Lines Written in Early Spring.“ 11.8-10.

2 The Early Letters 2; William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed.
by de Selincourt, p.448.

16

This sea that bares her bosom to the moon:

The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers:
For this, for everything, we are out of tune:
It moves us not.--Great God: I'd rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn:
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea:

0r hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.‘5

Here is a primitivistic yearning for the classical past.

The increase of wealth had been attended by an increase
in the complexity of life and by a commercializing and mat-
erializing frame of mind. This mental state gave rise to
two other well-known sonnets, which are among his best. In
one, written in London in 1802, the vanity and parade of his
country is lamented, and a feeling expressed that the march
of wealth is productive of mischief:

0 Friend: I know not which way I must look

For comfort, being, as I am, opprest,

To think that now our life is only drest

For show: mean handy-work of craftsman, cook,

Or groom:--We must run glittering like a brook

In the open sunshine, or we are unblest:

The wealthiest man among us is the best:

No grandeur now in nature or in book

Delights us. Rapine, avarice. expense,

That is idolatry; and these we adore:

Plain living and high thinking are no more:

The homely beauty of the good old cause

Is gone: our peace, our fearful innocence,
And pure religion breathing household laws.

Man has forgotten the simple things, and now he worships
Inaterial things, and has set them up for gods. Simplicity

:1s gone, and the poet is saddened by

y

3 1806 .

17

all the ways of men, so vain and melancholy.4

The famous sonnet on Milton, the greater of the two,
shows him in despair over the conditions of things in Eng-
land at that time:

Milton! thou should'st be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fan

0f stagnant waters: altar, sword, and-pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient dower

Of inward happiness. We are selfish men.

On the question of manners and morals, he offers further
reproof:

Oh! raise us up, return to us again: 5
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.

He looks with reverence to this man, one of the glories of
England's past, and shows that he thinks that England had
better man then; and he continues in the sonnet on Milton:

Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart:

Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,

So didst thou travel on life's common way,

In cheerful godliness: and yet thy heart

The lowliest duties on herself did lay.

He also admires Milton's poetry, for in a letter to an un-
known correspondent in 1802, he says:

NHlton's sonnets...I think manly and digni-
fied compositions, distinguished by simplicity
and unity of object and aim, and undisfigured by
false or vicious ornaments...upon the whole, I

 

‘ "Resolution and Independence,” 1.21.

5 1802.

18

think the music exceedingly well suited to

its end, that is, it has an energetic and

varied flow of sound.crowding into narrow

room more of the combined effect of rhyme

and blank verse than can be dogs by any

other kind of verse I know of.

It is true that such words of reverence for the past
and the degeneracy of the modern world are often supplanted
by others which breathe a stronger faith and hOpe in the
present, esgecially with reference to politics, as the son-
net,'It is not to be thought of that the Flood,"7 in which
he says that it is impossible to think of Britain's freedom
.perishing in "bogs and sands,“ and that it should “to evil
and to good be lost forever.“ And yet, even here he glori-
fies the England of the past:

In our halls is hung

Armoury of the invincible Knights 01 old:

We must be free or die, who speak the tongue

That Shakspeare spake; the faith and morals hold

Which Milton held.--In everything we are spring

Of Earth's first blood, have titles manifold.
Likewise, in the sonnet, “When I have borne in memory what
has tamed Great Nations,“8 he expresses shame for his “un-
filial fears,“ and shows his appreciation of England as “a
bulwark for the cause of men.“ “Anxious moods, however,

seem to predominate, as they often will with a patriotic

 

6 The Early Letters pf William and Dorothy Wordpworth, ed.
by de Selincourt, p.312.

7 1802.

8 1802.

19

observer of events, and eSpecially with the patriotic poet
whose sensitive soul is full of a strong love of freedom."9

In contrasting his country with another, Wordsworth
felt that England was superior to France:

Great men have been among us; hands that penned
And tongues that uttered wisdom-~better none:

France, 'tis strange,

Hath brought forth no such souls as we had then.
Perpetual emptiness: unceasing change:

No single volume paramount, no code,

No master Spirit, no determined road°

But eoually a want of books and men'.10

This is in contrasting his own country with anOther, but in
contrasting the fingland of his day with the England of yes-
terday, he could not feel the same superiority, for he says,
"Great men have been among us, and "no such souls as we had
.2222-" This is not an unconscious use of the past tense:
He names some whom he considers great, and then whom there
are "better none:”

The later Sidney, Marvel, Harrington,
Young Vane, and others who called Milton friend.

And he felt that they were superior, because

These moralists could act and comprehend:

They knew how genuine glory was put on;

Taught us how rightfully a nation shone

In splendour: ‘what strength was, that would
not bend'

But in magnanimous meekness.

 

9 Sneath, op. cit., p. 49.
O . '
1 1802.

20

The sympathy which he felt with the supposed restor-
ation of an idyllic order (in France) disappeared when it
took the form of social disintegration. Likewise, the
growth of pauperism in his own England, the factory system,
and the decay of the old simple society, intensified the im-
pression. In a letter to Charles James Fox in 1801, he says:

It appears to me that the most calamitous
effect, which has followed the measures which
have lately been pursued in this country, is a
rapid decay of the domestic affections among
the lower orders of society...For many years
past, the tendency of society amongst almost
all the nations of Europe has been to produce
it. But recently by the spreading of manufac-
tures through every part of the country, by
the heavy taxes upon postage, by workhouses,
Houses of Industry, and the invention of Soup-
shops &c. &c. superadded to the increasing dis-
proportion between the price of labour and that
of the necessaries of life, the bonds of dom-
estic feeling among the poor, as far as the in-
fluence of these things has extended, have been
weakened, and in innumerable instances entirely
destroyed...1n the mean time parents are separ-
ated from theii children, and children from
their parents.

In the two poems, "The Brothers“ and "Michael," he says that
he has attempted to draw a picture of the domestic affections
as he knows them to exist among a certain class in the North
of England. Wordsworth hopes that these two poems

may excite profitable sympathies in many kind

and good hearts, and may in some small degree

enlarge our feelings of reverence for our spe-
cies, and our knowledge of human nature, by

shewing that our best qualities are possessed
by men whom we are too apt to consider, not

 

11 The Early Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed.
by de Selincourt, p.260.

21

with reference to the points in which they re-
semble us, but to those in which they manifestly
differ from us.12
INOW3 in these days of degeneration, he hOpes that these tMD
poems might help "to stem this and other evils with which
the country is labouring."15
In a letter to Thomas Poole in 1798, he laments the
fact that
Money, money is the god of universal worship,
and rapacity and extortion among the lower classes,
and the classes immediately above them; and Just
sufficiently common to be a matter of glory and ex-
ultation.l4 ’
Likewise, in a letter to George Beaumont in 1804, he longs
for more unselfishness in men of genius:
It is such an animating sight to see a man of
genius, regardless of temporary gains--whether
of money or praise, fixing his attention solely
upon what is intrinsically interesting and per-
manent, and finding his happiness in an entire
devotion of himself to such pursuits as shall
most enable human nature.15
,This disapproval of existing conditions can be found
frequently in his poetry of this period. Further, his poem
"Guilt and Sorrow," as originally drafted, was without doubt
"intended to embody a protest against the criminal law gen-
orally, and the doctrine of capital punishment in particular?16

for in a letter to Wrangham.in 1795, Hordsworth said:

 

12 M” p, 262.
13.L29-.££E-

14 Map. 2.00.

15 DeSelincourt ed., I, 402.

6
Garrod, gh. cit., p. 84.

22

I have a poem.which I should wish to diapose of,

provided 1 could get anything for it. . .Its ob-

ject is partly to expose the vices of the penal

laws, and the calamities of war as they affect

individuals.1
The poem.uas not published until 1842, however, and its
published form shows many corrections, for Words worth had
in the meanwhile undergone many changes of ideas. But, or-
iginally, "Guilt and Sorrow" was a distinctively morbid at-

tack upon the whole social order.18

This poem, written
during hordsworth's worst period of gloom, is "one of the
very few pieces in which Hordsworth has had courage to ex-
press the full depth of his sadness: a noble sadness withal,
arising not from any trouble of his own, but from those of
his fellows-men."19 As Harper states, "The ravages of war
among the poor, raising prices, unsettling employment,
causing the horrors of forced conscription, with the break-
ing up of families and impelling of innocent people towards
legalized.murder, are portrayed in a startling light. There
is no relief, no suggestion that the glory of fiingland or the
elevation of great captains furnishes compensation for these
wars"20 Many have said that this poem is only a reflection
of Wordsworth's own grief. It is not fair to accept this,
for "it seems that he wrote as he did for the noble reason

that his mind was filled with sorrow for others, that he had

no thought of self, that he was not blinded by false appear-

 

17 Cited in G.M. Harper,”hilliam.Wordsworth, his Life, Womhg,
and Influence, I, 286.

 

18 Garrod, 92. cit., p. 85.

19 Legouis,,gp. cit., p. 241.
2° Harper, on. cit., I, 227.

—-L-

23

ances of national Splendour."21

Nor did his disapproval of existing conditions appear
only in his poetry, for in the pamphlet he wrote for the
Convention_hf Cintra, his one great political pamphlet, he
continues his attack on existing evils; he taxes the British
leaders with "an utter want of intellectual courage--of that
higher quality which is never found without one or other of
the three accompaniments, talents, genius, or principle."22
We are reminded of the self-complacent attendants of polit-
ical machines in our time, their narrowness of view, their
cynicism, their contempt for persons who are frank enough
not to deny their own honesty and good intentions.23 He at-
tacks the selfishness and the ulterior motives that many I
have for promoting war.

He shows again his distrust of industrialism which
was to be one of the dominant instincts of his later life.
Referring to Spain, he says:

Manufactures and commerce have there in far less

degree than elsewhere, by unnaturally clustering

the peOple together, enfeebled their bodies, in-

flamed their passions by intemperance, vitiated

from childhood their moral affections, and de-

stroyed their imaginations.29

In regard to his own country, with its near-sightedness,
and its loss of simplicity, he continues the theory of chron-

ological primitivism and the progressive degeneration of man:

 

21 Ibid.,

22 As cited in Harper, II, 178.
5
Ibid., 179.

24 Ibid., 180.

They

They

24

In many parts of EurOpe (and eSpecially in
our own country) men have been pressing forward
for some time in a path which has betrayed by its
fruitfulness; furnishing them constant employment
for picking up things about their feet, when
thoughts were perishing in their minds.

have become dazzled by materialism:

While Mechanic Arts, Manufacturing, Agriculture,
Commerce, and all those products of knowledge
which are confined to gross, definite, and tangible
objects, have, with the aid of EXperimental Phil-
osophy, been every day putting on more brilliant
colors;

have lost the true virtues:

the Splendour of the Imagination has been fading;
Sensibility, which was formerly a generous nurs-
ling of rude Nature, has been chased frmn its an-
cient range in the wide domain of patriotism and
religion with the weapons of derision, by a shadow
calling itself good sense; calculations of pre-
sumptuous eXpediency--gr0ping its way among par-
tial and temporary consequences--have been substi-
tuted for the dictates of paramount and infallible
conscience, the supreme embracer of consequences;
lifeless and circumspect Decencies have banished

the graceful negligence and unsuspicious dignity
of virtue.25

Then for a time even Wordsworth took to writing satires

on peeple 0f the times, together with his friend Wrangham..36

In a

letter to Wrangham.from.Racedown in 1795, the following

satirical passage on the Prince Regent appeared:

The nation's hOpe shall show the present time

As rich in folly as the past in crime.

Do arts like these a royal mind evince?

Are these the studies that beseem a prince?
Wedged in with blacklegs at a boxers' show,

To shout with trans port at a knock-down blow--
Mid knots of grooms, the council of his state,
To scheme and counter-scheme for purse and plate.

 

2

5 Cited in E.P. Hood, William.Wordsworth, p. 595-6.

36 Harper, gp. cit., I, 286-7.

25

Thy ancient honours when shalt thou resume?
Oh shame, is this thy service' boastful plume?-—37

In the other satires, only fragments of whichzare left, the
most vivid picture is that of a subservient Parliament and
the mad King: '

So patient Senates quibble by the hour

And prove with endless tongues a monarch's power,

Or whet his kingly faculties to chase 28

Legions of devils through a keyhole' s Space.
But'Wordsworth soon found a more congenial mode of eXpression
and suppressed his satire forever.

There were times when he had great doubts about the world
and its peOple which sometimes led him to some doubt about him-
self:

I have asked myself more than once lately,

if my affections can.be in the right place,

caring as I do so little about what the world

seems to care so much for.29
These moods were the exception rather than the rule, for'he
decided that if he could not change society by political rev-
olution, he would try to see what poetry can do to change
people's hearts and to enlarge their sympathy for men as men.
"He will not write heroics for the amusement of a corrupt So-
ciety; he will write of simple folk in simple language."50
For, with his Republicanism, Wordsworth had shed his ration-

alism, and had come to recognize

 

27 Ibid., 285.
28 Ibid., 287.

29 Letter to George Beaumont, 1805. DeSelincourt ed., I, 496.
O Sneath, 2p. cit., p. 56.

26

that there are powers in human nature, primary

instincts and emotions, more august and author-

itative than the logical reason. Now it is the

mark of democracy that it lays stress on the

things men have in common, not on those in which

they differ. And these primary instincts and

emotions are precisely what men have in common,

and so are the prOper themes for a democratic

Poet. 31
And so Nordsworth seeks his subjects, not among the ones of
the Golden.Age, not among classical antiquity, not among the
England of the past; but in the present, not among Godwintan
intellectuals, but among forsaken women, old men in distress,
children, peasants, and crazy pe0ple, in whom these instinctS'
and emotions show themselves in their simplest and most recog-
nizable form.

Most peOple who have any hOpe for the future will not
long remain chronological primitivists. This was true of
‘WOrdsworth. He felt that man had degenerated down through
the ages, but that there was some hope. And that hepe was to
be found in the country, among those close to nature. This

was the life that Wordsworth himself preferred.

 

51
Letter to George Beaumont, 1802. DeSelincourt ed., I,

526.

CULTUhaL enlnlrlvren IN LehowahTh
his Breference of Country Life to City Life

host critics are agreed that hordsworth was primarily
a citizen of the country. An” although many of them dis-
cuss at length his residence in London in 1791, they ad-
mit that the country was his real home, that it was the
real molder of the poet. beach says:

fiordsworth's preference of country to town,

like that of many eighteenth-century poets,

is probably somewhat colored by the romantic

legend of a Golden nge, in which man's heart

and manners were still natural, uncorrupted

by institutions and ideas which had swerved

from the simplicity of nature.

hordsworth had much to say of men as citizens. Of men
and women as individuals he had also much to say, within a
certain r'nre. "The city proletariat lay beyond his men."5
It.was not for h'm to sing

the fierce confederate storm

Of sorrow barricaded evermore

tithin the walls of cities;U
but rather

TO hear humanity in woods and groves
Pipe solitary anguish.&

 

 

1 Beach, goncepp_of nature in nineteenth Uentury Angligh
Poetry, p. ZOE-L.
”figu—

 

 

 

3 H.J.C. Grierson, g Uritical history of unelish Literature,

p . L) ti; Q

."
‘u'

U The ppcltse, ”49-855.

 

lb

Ibid., 78-7.

28

The ,rimary instincts and affections which are con rlon to
all mankind, these were his chosen subjects, and he looked
for them in the hum ble, rural lii'e, there they

Hi lple in their eler ents.
a plainer language--

ola inc r, but mare Ql"fllfjed from. association with the gran-
deur of Nature.

In book VII of The Prelude, hordsworth gives an ac-

 

count of the three and a half months he agent in London in
l7al. Ihis time and his secsnd visit to faris in 179;,
when he has absorbed in political event, were the only peri-
ods in which he had his home in a large city; "hence he
makes his first brief residence in London the occasion for
considering the contribution of city life to the deveIOpment
of the poet.”3

"The seventh and eiihth books of the poem contain many

passawe reflectin.

* l ,, er an interval of at least fourteen

*-
c+

f‘ _:.'0
CL

(’3

years, some of the inure ssions made upon him by the sights
of the city, but all carefully chosen to illustrate 'the
nrovth of a poet's mind,’ and particularly to show how the
love of nature, by which he me ans, in this connection,

"e

m
P-

country scenes and sounds, re; 1 ned supreme. Ihe incidents
are important only as Lordsworth tries to Show the effect
on his poetic faculties. Iheir izlfluence could sourcely

have been comparable to that of new;sheac and Cambridge,

 

3 K.D. havens, The Mind of a Poet, p. 4&5.

Harper, 0 . cit.

._._ _....__ 9

29

"they were purely exime nal and ileeting, the thinms every
iairlv Observant country-bred youth HOUlQ notice in the
streets and public haunts of town."7
except for tvo or three short visits from banbridge,
tordsmorth had apps ntlv never visited London until this
time. Iron childhood the thouoht of the great city had
held him by a chain "of yonder and obscure deli ht. "5 he
recalled a time in his life then the conception he had
formed of London, in his foolish sinplicity,surp1ssec all
the pictures of airy palaces and enchanted rardens invented
bv poets, and all the accounts :iven by hist011ans of Home,
bairo, oabvlon, or Persepolis.
how, far from that distant period, Lordsuorth had the'
Opportunity of comparing his dream ‘Nith the reality. "Though
he did not ECKHDVlGGfG it, he ras astonished to find the
silendours he had trusted to ‘ehold, so f w and far between."9
and he admits that "often 1ti11es in suite of strongest dis-
appointment," he was pleased merely

Through courteous self-submission, as a t‘iO
Paid to the object by prescriptive rirht.

In his first vear at Uambridqe he had gone up to London
on a stage-coach, and could scarCe lv celiev e it possible
that "mere ext Mrn 1 th in~s had power so to elevate and de-
press the spirit as the roar and nove21ents of the town alter-

nately raised and crushed his,”ll than he

 

 

 

'7 IOld., p. lOe.
8 Ire ireluce vii, :7.
9- .
L is, oo._git., p. 174.

loathe Prelude, vii, lea-a4.

—-- —-...— “-0-—

 

30

”elt in heart and soul the shock
hu~e town's first oresence. 0

It is ifloossible to distinguish the impressions received
drrine this short visit and those of 1791. Accordir: to

k

(D
(1'
U)

Lerouis,l“ these ixgr ions, as recorded later, may even

have been influenced by Lamb's descriotions of London.
Lordsuorth elves e catalox of details, but they "are venting

in that which constitutes the cherm of the humorist, and,
is the source of Lordsuorth's own gower in his pictures

. . w .. 14
of rustic life--a love of the things he descriues."

He clanced at the examgles of folly, vice, and extrav-
srsnce, thicr LEGS London their domain, and ne

hearc, end for the first time in mv life,

the voiCe of roman utter blssonemy---

A.

but he linvered over sights of courage and of tenderness,

1 1

rendered more touching by contrast. nnd he

rented at lerce, throuch London's wide domain,
Lonth after month. Obscurely did 1 live,
Not seekine frecuent intercourse with men,
By literature, or elegance, or rank,
Uistinfuished. 9

Yet even in the city, his thou hts vere often of the country,
and to their "beauteous forms,"
oft in lonely rooms, and mid the din

Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weeriness, sensations smeet,

 

12 Ibid., cs-ee.
15 02. cit., p. 172.
14 Ibid., p. 174.

13 The Prelude, vii, 375-6,

 

16 The Prelude, 1x, £3-27.

and

31

Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With Tranquil restoration.l7

51th deep devotion Nature, did I feel,

In that enormous City's turbulent world

Of men and things, what benefit I owed

To thee, and those domains of rural peace,
Where to the sense of beauty first my heart
Was Opened. 8

For perhaps

To one having had little experience with the world,
and with lofty conceptions of the dignity of human
nature, and its essential divineness, the revelations
of a sojourn in the heart of such a great center as
London, presenting all forms of physical and moral
evil, might cause a violent shock; his preconcigtions
and ideals might require a decided alteration.

But in "That huge fermenting mass of human-kind,"20 Wordsworth

says:

having been brought up in such a grand
And lovely region, I had forms distinct
To steady me . . .
At all times had a real solid world
Of images about me; did not pine
As one in cities bred might do.31

For under the guidance of Nature, long ago among the hills,

he had formed his ideal of man, and it did not fail him when

he beheld him.under less pleasing and less promising asPects.

 

And
when he came in contact with human ignorance and
vice, with crime and misery, although they weighed
heavily upon his soul, his confidence in Man and in
his destiny was not shaken.22
17 "Tintern Abbey," 25-27. 22 Sneath, 92. 9439., p. 48.

18 293 Prelude, viii, 70—4.
19 Sneath,.gg..g;§., p. 48.
20,2hg Prelude, vii, 621.

21,;gig.,.A viii, 595-605.

52

Neither did he believe that all his previous conceptions
were wrong: that he had merely been dreaming the soli-
tary's dream; that far away from the busy haunts of men,
he had framed an ideal in ignorance of man's real nature.

Heart-sick though he was at times, he could gaze

upon the dark and dismal human picture and see it

in touches of the divine, and its divinity shone

all the brighter by virtue of its striking con-

trast with the earthliness of the human.2

But, although he may not have detested towns like Cow-
per, or Lamartine, "he certainly was not altogether happy
in towns, and considered them.from the point of view, not
of a citizen, but of a provincial who is by turns dazzled
and deceived, charmed and scandalized."34.

Independent as he was of any society but his own, he
_ nevertheless suffered at times from the protracted soli-
tude of his life in London. "He contrasted his painful
loneliness among the crowd where

men lived

Even next-door neighbours, as we say, yet stilé

Strangers, not knowing each the other’s name,
with the sweet solitude of the country, and with village
life, in which each knows and is known by all the rest."36

And it is not his descriptions of the "monstrous ant--hill"27

 

and
Blank confusion: true epitome
Of what the might City is herselfz8
where
23 £4.92- 2.4.1.5.. 38 2933., 722-723.

24 Lesouis, 22. 3412., p. 174.
25 he. arming. v11. 115-18.

26 Legouis, gp. cit., p. 174.
37 The Prelude, vii, 149.

33

folly, vice,

Extravagance in gesture, mien, and dress,

And all the strife of singularity,

Lies to the ear, and lies to every sense-“29
have no end--it is not these descriptions which are impor-
tant, but rather in the lines "wherein he glorifies London
as a great and.mysterious being which influences the Spec-
tator with a power resembling, if not equivalent to, that
of sea or mountain."50

Although he was often revolted by the scenes diaplayed
before him, and sickened by the coarseness and brutality
characteristic of the great pepular festivals, such as the
fair of St. Bartholomew, he was never insensible to the mighty
forces revealed in these brutal aSpects of the .

vast metrOpolis,

Fount of my country's destiny and the world's;

That great emporium, chronicle at once

And burial place of passions, and their home

Imperial, their chief living residence.31
What he has to say about London seems to Mr. Harper to be
a "little forced." And apparently Wordsworth himself was
not completely satisfied with it, for, although he wrote of
it at undue length in this book (vii), he returned to it a-
gain in Books viii and ix. Havens says that ”It looks as
it, although conscious of the inadequacy of what he had writ-
ten, he could not bring himself to revise it radically."32
One difficulty lay, perhaps, in his inability throughout his

later years to do Justice to city life. This was not only

 

29 Ibid., 578-581.
30 Lagouis, pp. git” p. 1'79.

31 Ibid., P. 1790
32Havens, 93. Cit., p. 436.

34

because of his love of nature and plain living, but because
he believed life in the city to be destructive of individu-
ality:

Living amid the same perpetual whirl

Of trivial objects, melted and reduced

To one identity, by differences

That have no law, no meaning, and no end--53

and numbing to the creative powers:

A work completed to our hands, that lays,
If any Spectacle on earth can do, '
The whole creative powers of man asleep'..-34

and because "in his own case, it had meant separation from

those he loved, and wandering in the deserts of God:winian

rationalism."55

T

Yet, according to M. Legouis:

The future poet of the lakes was really the
first, if not to feel, at any rate to attempt to
render in verse worthy of the theme, and without
satirical design, the grandeur of London and the
intensity of its life. btrange as this fact may
appear at first sight, it is less surprising when
we reflect that the requisite striking impression
could only be felt by a man fresh from the world
outside of London, capable of new and vivid sen-
sations, and sufficiently Open in mind and inde-
pendent of classical authorities to venture on a
frank description of his novel impressions.56

But even M. Legouis admits that Wordsworth felt the grandeur
of the great city most of all "in hours of peace and soli-
tude. He loved to wander through the streets when the city

was wrapped in slumber,"57 and he enjoyedzmost

 

55 The Prelude, vii, 725-8.
54 Ibid., 679-81

55 Havens, 2p. cit., p. 436.

56,9p. cit., p. 170.

57 Ibid., p. 179.

35

- ‘ the peace
That comes with night; the deep solemnity
Of nature's intermediate hours of rest,
When the great tide of human life stands still;
The business of the day to come, unborn,
Of that gone by, locked up, as in the grave;
The blended calmness of the heavens and earth,
Moonlight and stars, and empty streets, and sounds
Unfrequent as in deserts.'58

It was only at moments like these, and like the impression
of the dawn from.Westminster Bridge in a coach in 1802, that
London could equal the beauty of nature, and could induce

in him.who contemplates it a state of reverie:

As the black storm upon the mountain-tap

Sets off the sunbeam.in the valley, so

That huge fermenting mass of human-kind

Serves as a solemn background or relief,

To single forms and objects,3§
which thus acquire more "liveliness and power" than they would
possess in reality.

"The flaunting vanity and the sumptuous extravagance of
London served also to throw into relief the simple touches
of courage and affection, the acts of heroism.or of modest
kindness which Lamb, and afterwards Dickens, loved to point
out among the humblest inhabitants of the great city."40 And
Wordsworth says

still I craved

An intermingling of distinct regards

And truths of individual sympathy

Nearer ourselves. Such often might be gleaned

From the great City, else it must have proved
To me a heart depressing wilderness.4l

 

58 The Prelude, vii, 649-61.
59 Ibid., 619-25.
0
Legouis, pp. cit., p. 181.
41 The Prelude, xiii, 110-15.

36

He was glad

and now most thankful that my walk
Was guarded from too early intercourse
With the deformities of crowded life,
And those ensuing laughters and contempts,
Self-pleasing.42

And he could not help feeling that

blessed be the God
Of Nature and of men that this was so;
That men before my ineXperienced eyes
Did first present themselves thus purified,
Removed, and to a distance that was fit:
And so we all of us in some degree
Are led to knowledge, wheresoever led,
And howsoever; were it otherwise,
And we found evil fast as we find good
In our first years, or think that it is feund
How could the innocent heart bear up and live!43

He felt that he was indeed fortunate to have first looked

At Man through objects that were great or fair;
First communed with him by their help. And thus
Was founded a sure safeguard and defence
Against the weight of meanness, selfish cares,
Coarse manners, vulgar passions, that beat in
On all sides from thz ordinary world

In which we traffic, 4

In later days, hordsworth seems to take some delight
in telling about the survival of a love for the country in
those who have been born there, yet whose lot it is to be
exiled in the great city, as with poor Susan:

'Tis a note of enchantment; what ails her? She sees

A mountain ascending, a vision of trees;

Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide,
And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside.

 

42 Ibid., viii, 329-33.
45 Ibid., 301-311.
44 Ibid., 515-22.

37

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.45
Then there is the old farmer of Tilsbury Vale, who, exiled in
London, cannot help handling and smelling the withered grass
on a passing wagon loaded with hay. In his leisure time he
is always trying to get into contact with country_life, and
whenever he has a moment to spare makes his way to Smithfield
--but "his heart all the while is in Tilsbury'Vale."46

And, although in the later books of The Prelude, iords-
worth tries to mitigate his resentment of the town which

found expression in The Recluse,4'7 there is little suggestion

 

of glamor in the only contemporary account of his first long
stay in the city:

I quitted London about three weeks ago, where .
my time passed in a strange manner; sometimes whir-
led about by the vortex of its strenua inertia, and
sometimes thrown by the eddy into a corner of the
stream, where I lay in almost motionless indolence.

Think not, however, that I had not many very
pleasant hours; a man must be unfortunate indeed
who resides four months in Town without some of his
time being d13posed of in such a manner, as he would
forget with:reluctance.48

 

46 "The Farmer of Tilsburyyale (1805)°
47 See notes 3 and 4 above.

48 Letter to Wm. Matthews, 1791. deselincourt ed., p. 48.

38

Wouldn't we be inclined to put more stock in an account of
his feeling written nearer the time of his sojourn there,
than one written fourteen years later in retrOSpect? Even

so, Wordsworth admits, finally, in The Prelude that

 

much was wanting; therefore did I turn
To you, ye pathways, and ye lonely roadsflr9

He turned away from the sources to which he had looked for
knowledge concerning Man, to other sources--to modest paths
and lonely roads--seeking them.enriched with everything he
prized, "with human kindnesses and simple joys."50 It was
in the lowly, simple-hearted peOple whom he met here that
he found the elements of human nature in their naturalness.
In minds largely untutored by the formal methods of educa-
tion, but deve10ped by intercourse with Nature and the sim-
ple life, he found what he deemed to be the universal pas-
sions, and heard words eXpressive of noblest sentiment and
truth. All this filled him with hcpe and peace. His faith
in Man returned, and he saw in his fundamental nature much

that promised good and fair.

 

49.222H23213g2, xiii, 116-118.

50
Ibid., 119.

39

The mural Folk

Evidences of hordsworth's acceptance of the theory
of pregressive degeneration, which has been an inherent
part of primitivism from the time of the first fables of
the Golden Age to the present, have been discussed in
Chapter Two. Man has de enerated down through the ages.

Is there, therefore, any possibility of his imiroving or

of his returning to tLat better state? Society cannot go
backwards. It must go forwards. If progress is inevitable,
then, will it be progress toward good or evil? God has
endowed all men, so runs the reasoning, with intelligence
sufficient to find out the uniform and eternal laws of
nature; if civilized man has failed to discover and follow
the laws of nature as perfectly as primitive man, it is be-
cause his mind and heart have become corrupted by the vices
of civilization.

Is there in the present any peeple who come near to
finding out the uniform and universal laws of nature? "The
idea that virtue and happiness inevitably accompany the
austerities of primitive life, a corollary of classical de-
nunciation of luxury, was to be found in the earliest six-
teenth-century travel-literature and comes down uninterrup-
tedly into the eighteenth century."51 'hhat this discussion
of luxury in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuriese-together

with actual economic and social issatisfactions--helped to

 

51 Lois thitney, Primitivism and the Idea pf_Prorress, p. 51.

 

40

bring about, by forcing the mind into a re-evaluation of

cultural refinement, was a renewed burst of enthusiasm

for simplicity, the simplicity of life according to nature.
tordsworth believed t:at the supreme lesSon of.Nature

was obvious to the lowliest as well as the highest and was:

written plain for all to read:

The primal duties shine aloft-~lihe stars,

The charities that soothe, and heal, and bless

are scattered at the feet of Man--like flowers.53
And when he had the left the great city and turned

To vou, ye pathways, and ye lonely roads55
to seek the "human kindnesses and simple joys," he had
learned that kindliness of heart abounded most where Nature
dictated the tasks of men—~where the complexities of social,
industrial, and commercial conditions had not entered to
destroy the simplicity of life.

Among such vocations was that of the shepherd, and this
class of men early appealed to hordsworth's imagination.
They were close to nature-~so close, indeed, as to hear her
very heart beat. Their lives were simple, natural, art-
less.

These shepherds, however, were not the ones we read

I!

of in ancient lore, nor in ShakeSpeare and Dpenser, nor

such, indeed, as hordsworth himself had seen living in a

 

52 The Excursion, ix, 258-40.

 

53 The Prelude, xiii, 117.

 

41

veritable pleaSure ground on the vast plains at the foot of
the Harz mountains. These were neither heroic nor hardy

enough."54

Word worth's shepherds were of a different type,
a more hardy and heroic type, the shepherd of his native
hills and mountains. This man, with his giant frame and
simple mien, with his consciousness of freedom in his vast
domain, appealed to nordsworth. he believed that the Lake
Country shepherd was, on the whole, the simplest, the hap-
piest, and the best of men. Nature had given him a sanc-
tity. he had been glorified "by the deep radiance of the
setting sun." he descried in the distant siy, "a soli-
tary object and sublime, above all height."50
Although by no means perfect, these were the least
corrupted peeple he knew, and their virtues showed what
nature intended man to be. Hence he dedicated himself to
the task of studying these simple folk, and of writing about
them and the environment that has made them what they are:
Of these, said I, shall be my song; of these,
If future years mature me for the task,
’will 1 record the praises, making verse
Deal boldly with substantial things; in truth
And sanctity of passion, Speak of these,
and justice may be done, obeisance paid
where it is due: thus haply shall I teach,
InSpire, through unadulterated ears
Pour rapture, tenderness, and hope,--my theme

No other than the very heart of man,
As found among the best of those who live,

 

C) ;
:5

'~bneath, pp. cit., p. 89.

55 The Prelude, viii, 259-271.

 

42

Not unexalted by religious faith,

Not uninformed by books, gooa boots, though few,
In Nature's presence: thence may I select
borrow, that is not sorrow but deli11ht;

And miserable love, that is not pain

To hear of, for the r1lory that redounds
Therefrom to humankind, and vhat «e are. 50

This promise is fulfilled in the "Lyrical Ballads" and in

"Michael," and in many other poems.

Later, as he journeyed from France to bwitzerland, he
was greatly impressed by the peaceful homes of the peasants.
To what extent the simplicity and contentment of their
lives appealed to him is made known to us in his own words:

Oh' sorrow for the youth who could have seen .

Unchastened, unsubdued, unaved, unraised

”lo patriarchal digni ty of niind,

And pure simplicity of wish and will,

Those sanctified a odes of peaceful man

ileased (thou h to hardship born, and coxnpass ed
round

with danger, varying as the seasons change),

Contented, from the moment that the dawn

(Ah! surely not without attendant gleams

Of soul-illumliation) calls him forth

To industry, by glisted'd s flun1 in rocks

whose evening Shadows lead him to rep: se.0

7

In "Descriptive bketches," he speaks of him who was
born and dvelt among the Alps as one who

all superior but his uod disdained,
walked none, restraining, and by none re stiained:
Confessed no law but what his reason tau ht,
Did all he wished, and wished but what he ours :ht.5‘

Comparison is made here between the "brute creation" that,

9

guided by instinct and natural desire, has he appi ass; and

 

56 The Prelude, xiii, Eta-ea.

 

01

7 Ibi 1d., vi, see—1e.

r! .. ,...
09 Lines 4o4-8.

43

civilized.man, who "anxious to be unhappy, industrious to
multiply woe, and ingenious in contriving new plagues, new
torments, to embitter life, and sour every present enjoy-
ment, has inverted the order of things, has created wishes
that have no connection with his natural wants, and wants
that have no connection with his happiness."59

These "dalesmen" lead a life very different from.that

of the dwellers in the city:

Immense
Is The recess, the circumambient world
Magnificent, by which they are embraced:
They move about upon the soft green turf:
How little they, they and their doings, seem,
And all that they can.further or Obstructt
Through utter weakness pitiably dear,
As tender infants are: and yet how great!
Loves, as it glistens on the silent rocks;
And them.the silent rocks which now from.high
Look down upon them; the reposing clouds;
The wild brooks prattling from invisible haunts;
And old Helvellyn, conscious of the stir 60
Which animates this day their calm abode.

The pastoral life everywhere had a fascination for him. He
was impressed by the simplicity and the strength of the na-
tives. And read from.them.

Lessons of genuine brotherhood, the plain

And universal reason of mankind,

The truths of young and old. 51
He began to talk with strangers whom he met in his wander-

ings, and to learn from them.important lessons. His inter-

course with these lowly peOple began in Racedown, and was

 

59 L018 Whitney. 22. 0113., p. 47.
60,2hg Prelude, viii, 55-69.

61 The Prelude, vi, 545-7.

44

continued in Alfoxden, where he loved to
Converse with men, where if we meet a face
We almost meet a friend, on naked heaths

With long long ways before, by cottage bench,
Or well-Spring where the weary traveller rests.

62
"The lonely roads," he says

Were Open schools in which I daily read

With most delight the passions of mankind,

Whether by words, looks, sighs, or tears, revealed.63
He was both astonished and gratified at the amount of native
intelligence and virtuous sentiment his conversations with
. such.men revealed, and this knowledge brought peace and
steadiness, healing and repose to his ruffled passions.
These men were a direct contradiction of his Godwinian teach-
ing, which maintained that virtue belonged to the wise, and
that vice was the offSpring of ignorance, Godwin taught
that we owe everything to education. Here Wordsworth feels
how little it has to do with genuine feeling and just senti-
ment. It was a pleasant surprise to this former disciple
of Godwin to discover evidence of sound judgment and char-
acteristics of true uprightness in the poor and deSpised.
And he delighted to see

into the depth of human souls,

Souls that appear to have no depth at all
To careless eyes.54

 

53 Ibid., xiii, 167-41.

63 Ibid., xiii, 162-65.

64 Ibid., 166-168.

45

His talks with these people proved to be a revelation to
him, and he heard

From.mouths of men obscure and lowly, truths

Replete with honour, sounds in unison '

With loftiest promises of good and fair.65

NOW’WOIdSWOTth perceived that abstract philosophers,
in order to make themselves better understood, or perhaps
because they knew no better, had levelled "down the truth
To certain general notions,"66 and had set forth only the

outward marks

Whereby society has parted man
Jr’rom man67

and had neglected the "universal heart." Now, enlightened
by his personal observations, he now saw men as they are
within themselves

How oft high service is performed within,
When all the external man is rude in show,--
Not like a temple rich with pomp and gold,
But a mere mountain-chapel, that protects

Its simple worshippers from.sun and shower.68

Here, too, are things such as Love that cannot
thrive with ease,
Among the close and overcrowded haunts
Of cities, where the human heart is sick,‘
And the eye feeds it not, and cannot feed.69

For to Wordsworth, Nature's highest are not her strivers,

 

65 Ibid., 182-85.

65 Ibid., 216.

67 Ibid., 219.

59 Ibid., 203-5.

46

but her simple and silent seers, those who, by much musing
on her processes, see deep into her heart. These he con-
trasts with the eloquent worldlings:

men for contemplation framed,

Shy and unpractised in the strife of phrase;

Meek men, whose very souls perhaps would sink

Beneath them, summoned to such intercourse:

Theirs is the language of the heavens, the power,

The thought, the image, and the silent joy:

Words are but under-agents in their souls; 0
These were men who could not borrow their ideas and phrases
from.books or from society, men who lived in loneliness,
bringing their experiences to independent utterance. Such
men have an occasional power of eXpression, for their words
and thoughts are carved out of life lived.

This simple life is not ”without attendant gleams of
soul-illumination." And these accounts are all in harmony
with what seems to be fundamental in Wordsworth's thinking
-- that Man and Nature are not far apart. ”The nearer that
social conditions approach those of primitive or patriarchal
man, the more accurately does Man hear Nature's voice, and
the more fully does she reveal herself to him."71

After giving an account of the peasants' virtues, which
arise from.their closeness to nature, Wordsworth tells of
the growth of his feeling for these simple folk. as a boy,
he had seen the "dalesman" against the back-ground of his

majestic surroundings. Hence in Wordsworth's youthful imag-

ination, the peasant took on something of the majesty of the

'hills:

 

7° Ibid., 271-76.
71 Sneath, 22. cit., p. 44-

47

A rambling school-boy, thus
I felt his presence in his own domain,
as of a lord and master, or a power,
Or genius, under Nature, under God,
Presiding; and severest solitude
Had more commanding looks when he was there.
When up the lonely brooks on rainy days
Angling I went, or trod the trackless hills
By mists bewildered, suddenly mine eyes
Have glanced upon him distant a few steps,
In size a giant stalking through thick fog,
His sheep like éreenland bears; or, as he stepped
Beyond the boundary line of some hill-shadow,
His form hath flashed upon me, glorified
By the deep radiance of the setting sun:
Or him have I descried in distant sky,
a solitary object and sublime,
Above all height! like an aerial cross
Stationed alone upon a Spiry rock
Of the Chartreuse, for worship.73

And now, once again, Wordsworth had come to feel "that the

goodness of the natural impulses of man, unhampered by con-

ventions and institutions, the human perfectibility for

whose sake he had hOped in the French hevolution, was here

to be met with in real life."73 The outcome of all this

subsecuently had a most vital bearing on his poetry, for

he was led to a firm determination to make Man the chief

subject of his song, for

Thus was Man
Ennobled outwardlybefore my sight,
And thus my heart was early introduced
To an unconscious love and reverence
Of human nature; hence the human form
To me became an index of delight,
Of grace and honour, power and worthiness.74

If this ideal view of man was an illusion, says

 

72 The Prelude, viii, 256-275.

75 R.E. POW/Vell, 9E0 Cite, Po 1320

74

The Prelude, viii, 276-81.

48

Wordsworth, it was at least a beneficent one. "He scorns
the literal-minded rationalist who would wish to deprive
him of it, and thanks God that the good in man was magni-
fied by his boyish imagination before he became aware of
the evil; this type of man later served as an ideal which
accompanied him, and was present with him in forming his
judgments of Man under far different conditions, when he
came in contact with the coarseness, vulgarity, and bodily
and spiritual degradation of the world which was manifested
on his visit to London. "He had learned his lesson con-
cerning Man so well among the hills and mountains, through
the ministry of Nature, that he was able to carry it with
him into life, and his Spirit did not fail as he beheld the
sorrowful human Spectacle which the great city presents."75
And it is, then, by looking at humanity in relation to ob-
Jects which are "great or fair" that love of nature leads
to love of man.

ESpecially in the romantic writers of Nordsworth's gen-
eration, according to Fairchild, you will find a strong sym-
pathy for all sorts of simple rural folk, "and you will of-
ten Justly infer that these lowly ones are lofty because of
their very lowliness--because they are close to that light
of nature from which the learned and sophisticated have
turned away."75 The naive and primitive souls admired by

the romanticist are above logic precisely because they are

 

75 Sneath, 92. Cite, p0 29.

76 H.N. Fairchild, The Romantic Quest, p. 155.

 

49

below it. In being close to Nature, they are close to the
supernatural, and partake of that "sense sublime of some-
thing far more deeply interfused" which can never be at-
tained through "That false secondary power by which we mul-
tiply distinctions."

It was this faith in the "natural man" which led him
to study "men who lead the simplest lives, and those most
according to nature; men who have never known false re-
finements, wayward and artificial desires, false criticisms,
effeminate habits of thinking and feeling, or who, having
known these things, have outgrown them,"77 to observe chil-
dren and animals; and to seek to render men's feelings "more
sane, pure and permanent, in short, more consonant to Nature,
that is, to eternal nature, and the great moving spirit of
things."78 Furthermore, he would sing of Man, not as Judged
by externals, but as he really is within himself. Hexnould
sing, too, of Man, not as found in high places, in the ele-
gant and refined classes, but of men,of everyday life, of
”the walks of homely life," for it is here, according to
Wordsworth, that we find the fundamentally human. He would
deal with.men in the simplicity of their being, and in the
simple everyday circumstances and situations, and in the or-

dinary language of men instead of in a diction foreign to

 

77 Letter to John Wilson, 1802. DeSelincourt ed., 293.

78 Ibid.

50

common life and belonging to a particular class of men, whom.
we call poets.79

And so the Lyrical Ballads and the poems of the same
group are a series of moral analyses, of a rich intrinsic
value, "discreetly guided by an edifying and utilitarian pur-
pose."80 Herein lies then a certain conception of "Nature,"
one in all her products. She has always, for Wordsworth, one
disposition--always except when he thought of the sea whidh
took his brother's life. He felt a benefit from the presence
of such a life of simplicity. "There was in it a kind of ab-
solute rightness and sanity, which had the power to regulate
his being when he had strained and distorted it by an arti-
ficial existence."81

This realism of Wordsworth's is a complex product, in
which, along with the desire for truth, "a love of Nature
and simplicity, and a reaction against false nobleness, com.
mingle with a social faith in the dignity of the humblest
lives."82

 

8° Legouis,,gp. cit., p. 36.
81 Powell, pp.c1t., p. 132.
82 Legouis, 2p. cit., p. 36.

51

Idiots and Crazy People

It was Wordsworth's intention to sing of men in the
simplicity of their being, and in simple everyday circum-
stances and situations. This he did in depicting the pea-
sants. He carried it one step farther in dealing with ab-
normal folk.

No one can doubt the sincerity and courage of Words-
‘worth in dealing with the group of characters which he
picked for his poems, especially in those poems in The
Lyrical Ballads which deal with human characters. In Book
Thirteenth of The Prelude, he tells something of his selec-
tion:

Long time in search of knowledge did I range

The field of human life, in heart and mind

Benighted; but, the dawn beginning now

To reappear, 'tmas proved that not in vain

I had been taught to reverence a Power

That is the visible qualitg3 and shape

And image of right reason.
And this power taught him

To look with feelings of fraternal love

Upon the unassuming things that hold 84

A silent station in this beautous world.
Thus he found in humble man "an object of delight, of pure
tmagination, and of love." And it is thus that in the Lyrical
Ballads, we are led into the closest spiritual fellowship
with the lowliest and the most forsaken of the earth. A

far-reaching charity, neither sentimental nor condescending,

—4_

85 Lines 16-22.

84 Lines 45-47.

52

embraces them all--the old Cumberland Beggar, Alice Fell,
the Idiot Boy--deprived by age, poverty, or misfortune of
all romantic charm. And, so that his purpose might not

be overlooked, the figures are presented in the most naked
simplicity possible.

In "The Idiot Boy," an extreme case, wordsworth shows
the courage of his convictions. This he supports by prose
commentaries which reveal the ultimate and spiritual foundap
tion of his purpose:

You begin what you say upon "The Idiot Boy"

with this observation, that nothing is a fit
subject for poetry which does not please. But
here follows a question, "Does not please whom?"
.....Pe0p1e in our rank in life are perpetually
falling into one sad mistake, namely, that of -.
supposing that human nature and the persons

they associate with are one and the same thing

. . . .These persons are, it is true, a part of
human existence. And yet few ever consider books
but with reference to their power of pleasing
these persons and men of a higher rank; few def
scend lower, among cottages and fields, and a—
mong children. A man must have done this habitu-
ally before his judgment upon "The Idégt Boy"
would be in any way decisive with me.

Madness is not a special feature of rustic life, and
the intensity achieved by a forceful representation of such
an abnormal passion cannot obviously be laid down to the
credit of such life. Yet there is in the rustic life more
sympathy toward the idiot:

.. . . the loathing and disgust which many peOple
have at the sight of an idiot, is a feeling which

 

85 Letter to George Beaumont (1805). De Selincourt ed., p.

435.

53

though having some foundation in human nature,

is not necessarily attached to it in any virtu-
ous degree, but it owing in a.great measure to
the false delicacy, and, if I may say it without
rudeness, a certain want of comprehensiveness of
thinking and feeling. Persons in the Lower Class
of society have little or nothing of this: if an
idiot is born in a poor man's house, it must be
taken care of, and cannot be boarded out, as

it would be by gentlefolks, or sent to a public
or private asylum for such unfortunate geings.
Poor peOple. . . have therefore a sane state, so
that without pain ogfisuffering they perform their
duties toward them. °

He goes even further and says

I have often applied to idiots, in my own mind,
that sublime expression of Scripture, that “their
life is hidden with God." They are worshipped,
in several parts of the East. . . . I have often,
indeed, looked upon the conduct of fathers and
mothers of the lower classes of society towards
idiots as the great triumph of the human heart.
It is there that we see the strength, disinter-
estedness, and grandeur of love; nor have I ever
been able to contemplate an object that calls

out so many excellent and virtuous sentiments
without finding it hallowed thereby, and having 87
something in me which bears down before aversion.

And in "The Idiot Boy," he depicts the joy, pride, and moral
good that may be develOped by an irrational affection.
Wordsworth is always struck by the pathos of unreason-
ing affection, whether manifested by the insane, or bestowed
on an object devoid of reason, and consequently, in either
case, useless. He depicts the love of Betty, the peasant
woman, for her idiot boy, her admiration of him in spite of

his affliction, the pride with which she hears and tells to

 

oo
03
I.“

O
0
0
Ho
6"
O

(I)
‘1
I."
0
O
O
O
.4.
d-
O

54

others his least phrase which contains a glimmering of sense,
and the happiness with which the poor idiot's existence fills
her life. ' ‘ ~
Wordsworth shows his ultimate purpose in writing the

poem:

This poem has, I know, frequently produced the

same effect it did upon you and your friends;

but there are many also to whom it affords ex-

quisite delight, and who, indeed, prefer it to

any other of my poems. This proves that the

feelings there delineated are such as men may

sympathise with. This is enough for my purpose.

It is not enough for me as a Poet, to delineate

merely such feelings as all men g9 sympathise

'with; but it is also highly desirable to add to

these others, such as all men may sympathise
With-.88 ‘ '

In another instance, in "The Mad Mother," he takes a de-
light in describing a crazy mother's fondness for her child,
her alternate thrills of joy and fits of madness. ”As Words-
'wcrth had_ penetrated through the show of outward things to
the primal impulses of Nature, so he cleaved through the
accidental and secondary elements in man to those primary
qualities essential and common to all human beings.“89 The
grand elemental principle of love works deeply in the heart
of the mother in moments of startling sanity and wandering.
Her achievement in motherhood of something normal and na-
tural, purging insanity itself of all that is fearful, and

bringing with it a vein of wholesomeness to cleanse and

 

88 Loc. cit.

89 Gingerich, __2. cit., 124.

55

sweeten her delirium, is a simple and passionate eXpression
of the calm of a great natural feeling:

0h! press me with thy little hand;

It loosens something at my chest;

About that tight and deadly band

I feel thy little fingers prest.
She is entirely oblivious of the other interests of men,
and this is the only passion left her by her madness; "she
shows it pure, absorbing and transforming all Nature to
its own eXpression, with.wild streaks of the fellowshild."90
In both these poems, Wordsworth opens up a vista of an
altogether different kind, and-he suggests that the person
whose deficiency in ordinary common sense in the index of
a closer approach to the inner fountains of Divine Wisdom
is himself something of the divine, which cannot be seen by
those with "meddling intelleotsf:

Oh: there is life that breathes not; Powers

there are
That touch each other to the quick in modes

Which the gross world no sense hath to perceive,
No soul to dream of.91

 

90 Powell, 22. cit., p. 159.
91 "Address to Kilchurn Castle."

56

Childhood and the Child of Nature

we have seen how iordsworth, with his Specific, concrete
reality, felt that a man in a.state of nature, living in the
present, can have some of the pre-civilization qualities of
goodness and truth. For him, this same goodness and truth
could be found in the child.

Wordsworth, a poet who never intended to write for
children, was more than any other eminent English man of
letters, a poet of childhood. "His heart was attuned to
childhood in all its manifestations."92

To him, childhood is a sublime and sacred thing.
Despite his later attempts to find phiIOSOphic insight in
maturity, he constantly looks back to the warm, fresh per-
ceptions of his own boyhood, and associates that warmth
and freshness with the heaven from which, "trailing clouds
of glory," the child has newly come.

Nowhere is the divine more concentratedly inherent
than in the heart of a child. This conviction seems gradu—
ally to have deepened in Hordsworth's mind. 'In ”We Are
Seven" and“Anecdote for Fathers,"both written in 1798, he
"expresses the bold surmise that a child's intuitions may
be a most important part of spiritual wisdom,"93 and he sug-

gests that there is much that adults could learn from chil-

 

93 A. c. Babenroth, English Childhood, p. 299.

93 S. F. Gingerich, Essays $3 the Romantic Poets, p. 136.

57

dren:

O dearest, dearest boy! my heart

For better lore would seldom yearn,
Could I but teach the hundredth part
Of what from thee I learn.9

This is Wordsworth in one of his most characteristic moods,
and in these two poems one cannot fail to be impressed "by
the vain hammering of the literal-minded adult's sense of
fact against the child's intuitive sense of truth."95

In "Lucy Gray" (1799) he spiritualized the little girl
as a permanent mystic presence of the lonesome wild. In
"The Fountain“ and "Two April Mornings" (1799) he suggests
that no substitution can be made of one child's personality
for another, and that there remains something intact and
inviolable at the center of each.

In ”Characteristics of a Child Three Years Old" (1811),
Wordsworth reflects on the innocence and the fleeting moods
of a.young child living in her own company.

Loving she is, and tractable, though wild;
And Innocence hath privilege in her

To dignify arch looks and laughing eyes;

And feats of cunning; and the pretty round
Of trespasses, affected to provoke
Mock-chastisement and partnership in play.
And, as a.faggot Sparkles on the hearth,

Not less if unattended and alone

Than when both young and old sit gathered round
To take delight in its actiVity;

Even so this happy Creature of herself

Is all—sufficient, solitude to her

Is blithe society, who fills the air

With gladness and involuntary songs.

Light are her sallies as the tripping fawn'e

 

94 ”Anecdote for Fathers," 57-60.

95 Fairchild, The Romantic Quest, p. 157.

 

58

Forth-startled from the fern where she lay couched;
Uthnought-of, unexpected, as the stir

Of the soft breeze ruffling the meadow-flowers,

Or from before it chasing wantonly

The many-coloured images imprest

Upon the bosom of a placid lake.

In "Michael" (1800) he strikes a deeper note, "where the
boy's heart is the source, not of ideas compounded out of
the senses, but of mysterious spiritual influences that re-
generate the father's mind."96 And the poet feels that it
is only to be expected

That from the boy there came
Feelings and emanations-things which were
Light to the sun and music to the wind;
And that the old Man's heart seened born again.97

In the sonnet "It is a Beauteous Evening Calm and
Free" (1802), the principle of the indwelling of Deity in
children and its regenerative influence becomes fully ar-
ticulate. A child may be mischievous or show fits of tem-
per, out there is beneath such moodiness always a deeper self,
not tainted with original sin but made up of heavenly at-
tributes. So that if one is looking for a living resemblance
of God and a close touch of him in this world, "one can as
readily see it and feel it in the face and heart of a.child
as anywhere."98 Although the child in the sonnet appears

untouched by the solemn feeling of Spirituality which fills

the mind of the adult, She is nevertheless divine:

 

96 Gingerich, pp, cit., p. 138.

7 Lines 200—204.

98 Gingerich, on. cit., p. 137.

i

59

Dear Child! dear Girl! that walkest with me here,
If your appear untouched by solemn thought,
Thy nature is not therefore less divine:
Thou liest in Abraham's bosom all the year;
And worship'st at the Temple's inner shrine,
God being with thee when we know it not.

And in "haternal Grief" (1810), he reiterates the same belief
in the divinity of childhood:

The Child she mourned had overstepped the pale

Of Infancy, but still did breathe the air

That sanctifies its confines, and partook

Reflected beams of that celestial light

To all the‘Little-ones on sinful earth

Not unvouchsafed--99
And in the epitaph for his son Thomas (1818?), he Speaks of

Six months to Six years added he remained
Upon this Sinful earth, by Sin unstained.

There is in Sordsworth a gradual growth of sympathy for
childhood, a gradual fu8101 of this sympathy with the cult
of nature, and a gradually growing primitivistic belief that
"the child's innocence and intuitiveness are precious as
showing what a rich heritage we bring into the world, and
how sinfully we Squander it."100 And he says

The thought of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benediction. . . .

For those first affections

Those shadowy recollections,

which, be they what they may,

Are yet the fountain-light of all or day,

Are yet a master light of all our seeing.101

Perhaps, Jordsworth's greatest tribute to the child is

in stanza viii of the "Intimations Ode," in which he addresses

 

99 Lines 14-18.

100 Fairchild, The Romantic Guest, p. 157.
101nIntimations Ode," IX.

60

the child as the seer of truths which adults search all

their lives to find:

Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie
Thy Soul‘s immensity;
Thou best Phi10S0pher, who yet dost keep,
Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind,
That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep,
Haunted for ever by the eternal mind,--
Mighty Pr0phet! Seer blest!
On whom those truths do rest,
Jhich we are toiling all our lives to find,
In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave;102

And yet he knows that soon the child will lose this insight

and will be weighed down by the weight of years:

Thou little Child, yet glorious in the might

Of heaven-born freedom on thy being's height,

Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke

The years to bring the inevitable yoke,

Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife?

Full soon thy Soul shall'have her earthly freight,
And custom lie upon thee with a weight, 103

Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!

In The Prelude, too, Wordsworth has written of the

sanctity of childhood:

And he

Our childhood side,
Our Simple childhood, sits upon a throne
That hath more power than all the elements.
I guess not what this tells of Being past,
Nor what it ausurs of the life to come;
But so it is.1 4 '

feels that there is

In simple childhood, something of the base
On which man's greatness stands.105

 

103 Lines 109-117.

103 Lines 123-132.

104 v,

* 105

507-12.

x11, 274-5.

61

And he employs the language of religion to reflect the
sacredness of childhood:

Ah! why in age .
Do we revert so fondly to the walks
Of childhood--but that there the Soul discerns
The dear memorial footsteps unimpaired
Of her own native vigour; thence can hear
Reverberations; and a choral song,
Commingling with the incense that ascends,
Undaunted, toward the impeibghable heavens,
From her own lonely altar?

It is a surmise, nothing more, that the excellence of
childhood may be an inheritance from a previous and presumably
superior state of existence.

Children trust to their vivid sense impressions,
their feelings, their instincts, as had Wordsworth:

I felt and nothing else; I did not Judge,
I never thought of Judging, with the gigs
or all this glory fill'd and satisfi'd. 9

But most adults are excluded from such complete acceptance
of life by their critical, analyzing intellects:

We, who now
Walk in the light of day, pertain full surely
To alchilled age, most pitiably shut out
From that which 1g and actuates, by forms,
Abstractions, and by lifeless fact to fact
Minutely linked withosiligence uninSpired. . .
By godlike insight.

"One reason for this glorification of childhood is that

childhood is preeminently the age of wonder."109

106 The Excursion, II, 36-44.
107 The Prelude, iii, A 234-40.

108 flwusings Near Aguapendente", 323-30.

109
Havens, pp, cit., p. 483.

62

The rainbow, the glowworm, the cuckoo, and the echo all
haunt Wordsworth's poetry as they did his mind from child-
hood. "This is also true of poets," he might have added,
for he no doubt agreed with Coleridge that
The poet is one who carries the simplicity of
childhood into the powers of manhood; who, with
a soul unsubdued by habit, unshackled by custom,
contemplates all things with the freshness and
the wonder of a child. . . What is old and worn
out, not in itself, but from the dimness of the
intellectual eye, produced by worldly passions
and pursuits, he (the poet) makes new. 10
This sense of wonder gradually fades until

At length the man perceives it die away
And fade into the light of common day. 11

And then only by the use of the Imagination, can the man
recollect these feelings of wonder experienced before, for
Wordsworth was far more deeply aware than most "now much of
the stock of knowledge we possess is due to the native ac-
tivity of our senses from infancy onward."112

Many of Wordsworth's contacts with nature are valued
not so much in themselves as because they bring back more
intense and delightful childhood experiences of the same
sort, and now it is not the Golden Age of legend but the
golden age of childhood which can be recaptured, sometimes

just by the Singing of a cuckoo:

 

110 As quoted in Havens, _p. cit., p. 483.
111 "Intimations Ode,"75—76.
113 Gingerich, pp, 913,, p. 111.

63

And I could listen to thee yet;
Can lie upon the plain

and listen, till I do biggt
That golden time again.

"In their endeavor to win men back to the simple life,
poets instinctively held up the Child as an ideal example
of simple, if not divine, contentment."114 Wordsworth's
wide observation of children in the Lake District provided
him with a rich fund of experience. And "he never ceased
to draw upon this in order to give point to the plea that,
he intended, should win men by the contemplation of innocent
childhood which spontaneously found its rich enjoyments in
the presence of nature."115

Although he preferred to write of children in rural
areas, flordsworth, nevertheless, more fully than any poet
of the preceding century, had ocserved children in the
crowded surroundings of the metrOpolis, and many portions
of books Seventh and Eighth of The Prelude deal with ac-
counts of children in town--at the fair, with the fiddler,
at the raree-show.

By a "faithful adherence to the truth of nature,"
Wordsworth tries to reawaken civilized man from the "leth-

argy of custom" by reference to powers to wnich any "feel—

ing mind" may awaken itself if man will only be as simple

 

113 "To the Cuckoo", ("O blithe newcomer").

114 Babenroth, _p, cit., p. 313.

115 Loc. cit.
116 The Excursion, IV, 786-793.

64

and natural as a child. But, like Bhake, it was in the
child unSpoiled by man that Wordsworth foung the most satis-
fying illustration of the simple life:

Poor men's children, they and they alone,
By their condition taught, can understand
The wisdom of the prayer that daily asks
For daily bread. A consciousness is yours
How feelingly religion may be learned
In smoky cabins, from a mother's tongue--
Heard while the dwelling IiBrates to the din
Of the contiuous torrent.

And so there is a gradual fusion of his interest in child-
hood with his love of nature, which results in the child of
nature. The child of nature--most oftei a gir1--srows up

in a rural region.more or less uncorrupted by society. "From
the spirit of goodness immanent in the scenery she draws
beauty, innocence, and instinctive moral sense, and often, an

117

intuitive insight into the heart of things. The most fa-

mous example of the child of nature in Wordsworth is the Lucy
poems:

She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove

A.Maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love:

A violet by ammossy stone
Half hidden from the eye:
Fair as a star, when 011g one
Is shining in the sky.

 

116 The Excursion, IV, 786-793.
.117 Fairchild, The Romantic Quest, p. 158.
118 ”She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways," (1799).

And in "Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower," nature

recognizes that

a lovelier flower
On earth was never sown.

And nature shall take her and raise her and

will to my darling be
Both law and impulse: and with me
This Girl, in rock and plain,
In earth and heaven, in glade and bower,
Shall feel an overseeing power
To kindle or restrain. 2

And Lucy was to be free to enjoy nature and thus learn by

the beauty of the visible world:

"She shall be sportive as the fawn
That wild with glee across the lawn,
Or up the mountain springs;

And here shall be the breathing balm,
And here the silence and the calm

Of mute insensate things.

"The floating clouds their state shall lend
To her; for her the willow bend;

Nor shall she fail to see

Even in the motions of the Storm

Grace that shall mould the Maiden's form

By silent sympathy.

"The stars of midnight shall be dear

To her; and she shall lean her ear

In many a secret place

Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
And beauty born of murmuring sound

Shall pass into her face.

“And vital feelings of delight

Shall rear her form to stately height,
Her virgin bosom swell;

Such thoughts to Lucy I will give
While she and I together live

Here in this happy deli."121

 

119
120

Lines 2-4.

Lines 7-12.
131 1799

65

66

And Lucy Gray no mate, no comrade knew

She dwelt on a wide moOr,
The sweetest thing that ever grew
Beside a human door.12

But Lucy is not the only examplein Wordsworth of the child
of nature; we need only glance at Ruth, who

Had built a bower upon the green
As if she from her birthfihad been
An infant of the woods.143

And "To a.Young Lady“:

Dear Child of Nature, let them rail!
--There is a nest in a green dale,

A harbour and a hold;

Where thou, a Wife and Friend, shalt see
Thy own heart-stirring days, and be

A light to young and old.

There, healthy as a shepherd boy,
~And treading among flowers of joy
Which at no season fade,
Thou, while thy babes around thee cling,
Shalt show us how diyéze a thing
A Woman may be made.
"The Westmoreland Girl,” too, was

Left among her native mountains
With wild Nature to run wild.135

Wordsworth by this time, however, had lost his faith in the
disciplinary power of nature, and the Westmoreland Girl is
"as much a.weed as a flower, and needs moral and intellectual

cultivation.”136

 

133 1800.

133 Lines 10-13, 1799.

124 1802.

125 1845.
126

H. N. Fairchild, The Noble Savage, p. 367.

 

67

But in the early period, communion with nature was
beneficial, and the child of nature in "we Are Seven" was
beautiful to behold:

She had a rustic, woodland air,
And she was wildly clad:

Her eyes were fair, and very fair;
-—Her beauty made one glad. 37

This benign influence continues as the child grows, and in
"To a Highland Girl" he says

For never saw I mien, or face,

In which more plainly I could trace
Benignity and home-bred sense
Ripening in perfect innocence.

Here, scattered, like a random seed,
Remote from man, Thou dost not need
The embarrassed look of shy distress,
And maidenly shamefacedness:138

This influence even reaches adults such as hichael, whose
fields and hills "had laid strong hold on his affections."
And so, the poet who longs for

Summer days, when we were young;

Sweet childish days, that were as long

As twenty years are now.
feels that it would be well for him, as for mankind,

here to dwell
Beside thee in some healthy dell;
AdOpt your homely ways, your dress.130
Thus Wordsworth had at first placed emphasis on the

divine in Nature; and gradually he was led to the divine

 

137 1798.
128 Lines 24—31.
129 "To a Butterfly," 1802.

o _
13 "To a Highland Girl."

68

in Man. In the broadest sense, the earth is a sacred dwell-
ing and all visible objects are somehow charged with revels?
tions of spiritual truths. Or, to put it otherwise, "the
Presence at the heart of all things, working through natural
objects, childhood intuitions, memory, and human character
and human conduct, has a redemptive and re-creative influence
on all who, with reverence, heed its power, like Wordsworth
who felt that

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, 131

The sleep that is among the lonely hills.

And in his poetry, the peasant, the idiot, and the child

imply a desire to rise above the trammels of the man—made
world of sophistication and intellectualism toward the purer
realm of Spiritual intuition and the simplicity of sense
eXperience. Nature as a whole has her own mighty and in-
definable voice, the sum of all these separate voices- the

rustic, the idiot, and the child. "It is this and no other,

which, were it understood, would reveal the great secret."132

 

131 "Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle" 161-165.

132 Legouis, _p, cit., p. 403.

69

Anti-Intellectualism

In view of wordsworth's views on the evil results of
industry in its interference with the inborn right of chil-
dren to a free, open-air childhood, and in view of his at-
titude on the native ability of the ideal peasant who en—
joyed true freedom, it is only to be expected that he would
be out of sympathy "with the cramping and cramming systems
that failed to catch the spirit of freedom essential to his
philosophy of life with respect to children."133

’He was inclined to be hostile to bookishness in the
early years, and apparently held mere learning in light es-
teem. "The outstanding characteristic of his conception
of education is his minimizing the intellectual side and
insisting that books and formal teaching are less important
‘ than play, association with other boys and with nature."134

But Wordsworth's anti-intellectualism was different
from most. He was free from that form which insists that
learning encumbers poetic genius, that the true poet does
not need books and derives little from the study of his
predecessors. And, indeed, in the conclusion of lag Prelude,
he regrets that he has not said more about the influence
of books--good books--on his deve10pment.

Yet for bookishness he had a great distrust. "Books,"

he complained, "mislead.us."

 

133 Babenroth, 92, cit., p. 348.

134 Havens, pp. cit., p. 128.

70

seeking their reward
From judgments of the wealthy Few, who see
By artificial lights; how they debase 135
The many for the pleasure of those Few.
Wordsworth's boyhood and youth seem less marked by
intellectual interests than those of most men who later
show considerable intellectual power. He lived chiefly
by his instincts and emotions.
At Cambridge, he says
I did not love,
Judging not ill perhaps, the timid course
Of our scholastic studies . . .130
The fact that he inserted the "judging not ill perhaps,“
in the revision of The Prelude shows that he had no regret
for his earlier attitude. He was convinced that he was
right in believing the course of study uninspired.
As he grows older, he is more and more convinced that
such curricula are lacking:
Andy-now convinced at heart
How little those formalities, to which
51th overweening trust alone we give
The name of Education, have to do
with real feeling and just sense. 137
"Althou gh he is quite sure that the 800pe of formal edu-
cation should be broadened, he wearily gives up when it

comes to discussing such details as the value of examiner

tions."138‘ Of them he says

 

135 The Prelude, xiii, 208-211.

135 Ibid., iii, 498-8.
187 ”m

Ibid., xiii, 188-72.
188

Mary Burton, The One Wordsworth, p. 88.

71

things they were which then 139
I did not love, nor do I love them now.

He believed that the presidents and deans may as well still

their bells

till the spirit
Of ancient times revive, 3nd youth be trained
At home in pious service.1 0

The cramming process then in vogue produced infant prodigies,

who in his eyes were little monstrosities. And in speaking

of the model child, which he abhors, he says:

Briefly, the moral part
Is perfect, and in learning and in books
He is a prodigy. His discourse moves slow,
Massy and ponderous as a prison door,
Tremendously embossed with terms of art;
Rank growth of propositions overruns
The Stripling's brain; the path in which he treads
Is chok'd with grammars; cushion of Divine
has never such a type of thought profound
As is the pillow where he rests his head.
The Ensigns of the Empire which he holds,
The Globe and sceptre of his royalties,
Are telesc0pes, and crucibles, and maps.141

This long passage is later summarized in "a miracle of

scientific love.‘l Another passage with strong language,

also later deleted, concerns education:

Now this is hollow, 'tis a life of lies
From the beginning, and in lies must end.
Forth bring him to the air of common sense,
And, fresh and shewy as it is, the Corpse
Slips from us into powder. Vanity
That is his soul, there lives he, and there moves;
It is the soul of everything he seeks;
That gone, nothing is left which he can love.143

 

139

140
141

142

T
I

he Prelude, iii, A 69—70.

b

i

d., iii, 410-12.

H
C"

i

do, V, A 318-300

Ibid., 850-88.

Wordsworth's heart goes out to the child, who is not to be
blamed:

For this unnatural growth the trainer blame.
Pity the tree.14

For the poet felt that books were
a dull and endless strife:
Come, hear the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music! on my life,
There's more of wisdom in it.144

Although Jordsworth was not Specifically a follower
of Rousseau, his doctrine of the minimum of interference,
restraint, and guidance for the child is in fact very much
like Rousseau's belief that with the child, one should not
gain time but lose it. Like Rousseau, Wordsworth did not
want to make a man out of a child as soon as possible. Like
Blake, he reCOgnized the individuality of the period of
childhood, and reSpected it; and he felt that childhood
should be appreciated for what it is, rather than for what
it promises for the future.

The child should be allowed to play and to roam with
nature, for wordsworth "believed that the true normal man
is shaped only by the sensations originally ordained for
him"145--those which he receives from Nature with her form

unchanged, "save by the simplest work of human hands." The

child has no freedom in the systems used for his education:

 

143 Ibid., v, 828.

144 "The Tables Turned," (1788).

145 Powell, pp, cit., p. 188.

73

For, even as a thought of purer birth

Rises to lead hhn toward a better clime,

Some intermeddler still is on the watch

To drive him back, pound him, like a stray,

Within the pinfold of his own conceit.“6

As in Blake's conception, all knowledge should be de-
light, "which in Wordsworth's interpretation is to be found

"147 where in-

in the presence of enduring things in nature,
fant sensibility might be augmented and sustained in free-
dom.

Although Wordsworth did not definitely suggest corre-
lating play and study in the curriculum, he did insist on
the right to freedom from supervision and control in order
to liberate the child for the natural guidance of woods and
streams. And it is significant to Babenroth that Wordsworth
named the first two books of The Prelude not "School" but
"School-time."148

And Wordsworth never forgets the good influence on
growing minds of woods and streams:

Nor have I tracked their course for scanty gains;

They taught me random cares and truant joys,

That shield from.mischief and preserve from stains

Vague minds, while men are growing out of boys.149

This is in harmony with his belief that the child's mind

 

146 The Prelude, v, 332-336.

147 Babenroth, 9p. cit., p. 353.

148 Loc. cit.

149 "The River Duddon,"’xxvi.

74

should not show too many traces of man's handwork, "whose"
meddling and sympathizing would straighten the windings of
. the Duddon and Derwent.150 For he believed,

Sweet is the love which Nature brings;

Our meddling intellect

Mis-shapes the beauteius forms of things:--

We murder to dissect. 51
And he contrasts nature (”the image of right reason") with
the false, analytical power. Nature

matures

Her processes by steadfast laws; gives birth

To no impatient or fallacious hOpes,

No heat of passion or excessive zeal,

No vain conceits.152
"He came to realize that truth is found only through the
activity of the whole man; the affections, the will, and the

"153 Analysis tends

senses are as necessary as the intellect.
to bring out the differences in men rather than their funda-
mental likenesses, which the heart reveals. And because ed-
ucation was directed mainly toward deve10pment of "real feel-
ing and just sense," it had little relation to life and was,
therefore, almost futile.

Wordsworth now feels that "'tis the heart that magni-

fies this life,"154

 

15° Babenroth,lgp. cit., p. 355.

151 ”The Tables Turned.”

152 The Prelude, xiii, 226.'.

153 Havens, 2p, cit., p. 130.

154 "Enough of Climbing T011," 12.

75

Vain is the glory of the sky,

The beauty vain of field and grove,

Unless, while with admiring eye

We gaze, we also learn to love--155
that is, to love mankind. And if we have learned to love,
one moment of communion with nature

nOW'may give us more'
Than years of toiling reason.

There can be no better illustration of Wordsworth's an-
ti-intellectualism.than his turning to his humble neighbor
for guidance. Godwin had said that such peOple could know
little of virtue or of happiness. "Of theory, logical sub-
tlety, and analysis they had scarcely heard; yet Wordsworth
found them.rich in wisdom."156 But he was not helped by the
affections 22E man and nature, but rather by the affections
wedded to nature and men, "by nature bound through the af-
fections to men and to himself, and by men living close to
nature in their 'natural abodes,‘ where the affections flour-
ish."157

The method of analytical reason, the deliberate activ-
ity of the conscious mind, was reSponsible for its limita«
tions. "Only little truths are to be reached in this way;
great truths are not found, they are given."158 Our part is

to wait in quiet, to meditate, to receive:

 

155 "Great Sight," 5-8.

156 Havens,.gp. cit., p. 133.

157 Loc. 0
158

it
Loc. cit.

76

Think you, 'mid all this mighty sum

or things forever Speaking,

That nothing of itself will come

But we must still be seeking?159
and

Nor less I deem that there are Powers

Which of themselves our minds impress;

$382 liséag‘aizifiefifiiiiéé‘d °"
Intuitive truths are the deepest and best. And he urges us
to leave "our meddling intellect" and bring with us "a heart
that watches and receives."161

"Expostulation and Reply" and "The Tables Turned” have
been called the most primitivistic poems of English litera-
ture,162 for in the former, power comes to man from all the
mighty sum of things forever speaking, while in the latter,
a companion piece, Nature, blessing us with spontaneous
truth, is the wisest teacher of mankind. Thus Wordsworth
says that man preserves his strength only so long as he
keeps his feet on the earth; that vivid life of the senses,
close contact with fields and streams, is necessary if one's
reasoning is not to go astray. And these two poems are de-
voted to the contrast between the wisdom derived through
the senses and the mis-Bhapen conceptions furnished by the
intellect. Wordsworth wishes to make three points: (1) that

the true end of

 

159 "Expostulation and Repro"
16° Loc. cit.
161 "The Tables Turned."

162 Babbitt, "The Primitivism of Wordsworth," Bookmsn
(U. s. A.), LXXIV, (1931) p. 5.

77

education is the acquisition of "real feeling and Just sense;"
(2) that this end is achieved, not in schools and books, but
(3) in the "Open schools" in which tillers of the soil work}65
And by so doing, he is striking persistently at the cool,
logical, analytical, eighteenth-century kind of reason--”that
false secondary power by which we multiply distinctions," as
he called it.

“And the prevalent shrinking away from the vices of town
toward rural innocence has as a corollary the notion that
some causal relation exists between virtue and ignorance on
the one hand, and between vice and learning on the other.”164
And, if Wordsworth did not believe this when he wrote the

last of the Excursion, we can feel sure that this was a fun-

 

damental tenet of his poetry before 1805.

 

163' '
Havens, op, cit., p. 593.

4 .
16 Fairchild, The Romantic Quest, p. 113.

CHAPTER FOUR
WORDSHORTH AND ROUSSEAU

There has been, and still is, a great deal of con-
troversy about the influence of Rousseau upon Wordsworth.

Many writers are largely contradictory in their deve10pment

of this theme.1

Legouis maintains that Wordsworth's work might be
described as an English variety of Rousseauism. The fol-
lowing passage gives it more clearly:

In Wordsworth, we find Rousseau's well-known
fundamental tenets: he has the same semi-mys-
tical faith in the goodness of nature as well
as in the excellence of the Child; his ideas
on education are almost identical; there are
apparent a similar diffidence in respect of
the merely intellectual processes of the mind,
and an equal trust in the good that may accrue
to man from the cultivation of his senses and
feelings. The difference between the two,
mainly occasional and of a.political nature,
seem secondary by the side of these profound
analOgies. For this reason, Wordsworth must
be placed by the general historian among the
numerous “sons of Rousseag," who form the main
battalion of romanticism.

"The world into which Wordsworth was born was one
deeply influenced by Rousseau: and.that the young poet
should have been influenced deeply by Rousseauistic influ-

ences was absolutely inevitable."3 His teachings were per-

 

For example, Irving Babbitt and Emile Legouis.

Emile Legouis, "William Wordsworth," Cambridge History 9:
English Literature, XI, p. 103.

3 Arthur Beatty, William Wordsworth: His Doctrine and Art

'33 Their Historical Relations, p. 18.

79

vasive throughout EurOpe. The age was one in which the
desirability of a return to nature was proclaimed as a
gospel. The atmosphere was more or less charged with it,
and Wordsworth was undoubtedly affected by it--"a11 the
more because it was in harmony with his own predispositions
and likings."4

But, after all, Nordsworth's profound interest in has
ture, and his fundamental faiths concerning her, were large-
ly due to his own mystical endowment5 and to his personal
relations with her during many years in an environment re-
markable for its physical beauty and grandeur. This is a
side of Wordsworth that is not Rousseauistic, and it is that
part of him which gives him originality and distinotness.
For he spoke out of his own rich eXperience.

Yet, it has generally been assumed "even by the so-
berest scholars that the poet was deeply influenced by the
thought of Rousseau."6 Professor Harper declares: "Rous-
seau it is, far more than any other man of letters, either
of antiquity or of modern times, whose works have left
their trace in Wordsworth's poetry."7 Yet, without the
aid of Rousseau, we can imagine that Wordsworth, with his
environment of nature, might well have become just what he

did become. Nevertheless, to Harper, the points of agree-

 

4 Sneath, _p, ci ., p. 305.
5 Ibid.
6 Beach gp.cit., p. 572.

7 Harper, _p,cit., p. 128.

80

ment are too numerous to be the result of mere coincidence.8

An examination of Rousseau's language shows a distinct
preference for the diction of common speech. Wordsworth's
earliest poems, composed before he had read Rousseau, show
little of this tendency. "It is quite possible that he owed
more in this reapect to Rousseau than has yet been acknow—
ledged."9

There is evidence that Wordsworth was acquainted with
Rousseau. When he went to France, he met Captain Michel
Beaupuy, a disciple of Rousseau, confident in the belief
that the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity would
emerge triumphant from the tide of political change. "Un-
der Beaupy's guidance, he read Rousseau and much propaganda
besides; after his death there was found in his library a
bundle of 'French pamphlets and.ephemera' testifying to his
studies at Blois."10 It is also known that a copy of Efllli
and Rousseau's Confessions were among the books in his li-
brary at his death.11 And Joseph Fawcett, whom Wordsworth
knew and heard personally in 1793-95, was an enthusiastic
admirer of Rousseau. But the most striking example of his
acquaintance with the French author is the paragraph in the

pamphlet on The Convention 2; Cintra, in which he speaks of

 

 

8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10
Malcolm Elwin, The First Romantics, p. 36.
11

Beach, _p, cit., p. 138.

81

"the paradoxical reveries of Rousseau,"12 along with similar

disparaging remarks on Voltaire and Condillac. This atti-
tude in 1809 does not make it impossible, especially in a
man like Wordsworth, that in 1791 or 1788 he was more sym-
pathetic toward his views and sentiments.

It is doubtless true that in "Descriptive Sketches,"
published in 1793, "he is influenced by Raymond, with whose
account of the Alps he was acquainted, and also by Rousseau,
so that there is a.1ack of Spontaneous and original feel-
ing aroused by the memory of his visit.13

Rousseau's doctrine was that man, good, but corrupted
by bad laws and customs, should.be freed from these and left
to the guidance of his own personality. "Tout est bien,
sortant des mains de l‘auteur des choses; tout degenere en-
tre les mains de l'homme": so says Rousseau in the first
sentence of Egglg. And Wordsworth talks of "that false
secondary power by which we multiply distinctions." "This
was no sudden manifestation of a apirit of revolt; it had
been swelling in volume for many years."14 Granting, then,
that this anti-intellectualism and anti—sophistication is
too greatly pervasive in English literature from about the
middle of the eighteenth century to justify ascribing the

whole tradition to Rousseau, nevertheless, "if we allow

 

12

Cited in Beach, p. 118.
13 Sneath, pp. cit., p. 43.
14

A. C. Baugh, A Literary History gf_England, p. 1124.

82

Godwin and Rousseau to stand for two rather markedly dif—
ferent tendencies in the thought of the period, Wordsworth's
movement from the former to the latter between 1796 and 1798
is evident."15 For there are many ideas that Wordsworth
had in common with Rousseau, whether or not he was direct-
ly influenced by him. There can be no doubt that Wordsworth
shared.Rousseau's belief in impulse and creative energy as
against law and discipline; in vision as against scientific
analysis; and in imaginative as against reasoned comprehen-
sion.

"L'homme est he'libre, et partout il est dans les fers":
so begins the Contrat Social. And in "Descriptive Sketches,"

'Wordsworth says:

Once Man entirely free, alone and wild,

Was bless'd as free--for he was Nature's child.
He, all superior but his God disdain'd

Walk'd none restraining, and by none restrain'd,
Confess'd no law but what his reason taught, 17
Did all he wish'd, and wish'd but what he ought.

Later, in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, Words-
worth takes as his model and ideal the utterances which pas-

sion wrings from life in the living:

But whatever portion of this faculty we may sup-
pose even the greatest Poet to possess, there can-
not be a doubt that the language which it will
suggest to him, must often, in liveliness and
truth, falls short of that Which is uttered by men
in real life, under the actual pressure of those

 

15 Fairchild, Ihg Romantic Quest, p. 113.
6
Powell, op. cit., p. 53.
17 Lines 433-438.

83

passions, certain shadows of which the Poet thug
produces, or feels to be produced, in himself.1

This is, almost, the ideal of style which Rousseau puts
/
forth in the second Preface to §g_Nouve11e Heloise:

Croyez-vous que les gens vraiment passiones
ayegt ces maniEres de parler vives, fortes, colo-
rie s que vous admirez dans vos Dramas et dans

vos Romans? Non; 1a passion, pleine d'elle—méme,

s 'exprime avec plus d'abondance que de force;

elle ne songe pas me e a persuader; elle ne soup-

'3onne pas qu 'on puisse douter d'elle. Quand elle

dit ce qu 'elle sent, c 'est moins pour l'exposer

aux autres que pour se soulager. . .

Wordsworth finds a kinship with Rousseau in his high
esteem for reverie as a mode of thought. "Reverie is an in-
active, unsystematic kind of meditation, distinguished from
logical processes of discourses by the absence of conscious-
ly perceived steps."19 It evolves a more complete merging
of the thinker in his thought. It discloses to the mind
what the mind already contains, but discovers no new subjects
of thought. "It arouses, arranges, unifies, the elements
of one's soul, and the dreamer may emerge from his dream
with a truer knowledge of himself and a more definite pur-

n20

pose. Wordsworth's ”Poetry is emotion recollected in

tranquillity"21 has its counterpart in Rousseau's Les
Beveries g3 Promeneur Solitaize:

 

18 1800 Preface.

19
20 Ibid.

21 1800 Preface.

Harper, _p. c__i__t. ,I, p. 129.

Delivre de toutes les passions terrestres qu'en-
gendre 1e tumulte e la vie sociale, mon‘ame
s'elancerait frequ mment au-dessus de cette at-
mOSphere. . . de m'y transporter chaque jour sur

les ailes de 1'imagination, et d'y gofiter durant
quelques heures le méme plaisir que si je l'habitais
encore. Ce que j'y ferais de plus doux serait d'y
rever 3 mon aise. En revant que j'y suis, ne fais—
je pas 1a méme chose? Je fais méme plus:

l'attrait diune reverie abstraite et monotone, je
joins des images charmant$s qui la vivifient. Leurs
objets echappaient souvent a mes sens dans mes
extases; et maintenant, plus ma.reverie est pro-
fonds, plus elle me les peint vivement. Je suis
souvent plus an milieu d'eux, et plus Sgreablement
encore, que quand j'y Etais rEelement.

This mood and idea have been immortalized by Wordsworth in
speaking of the daffodils:

I gazeds-and gazed-~but little thought
that wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in.pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Hhich is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.33

A second element in Wordsworth which is evidenced in

Rousseau is his desire to simplify: to reduce the number
and conplexity of experiences and ideals. He extols a sim-
pler and more primitive state of society before the division
of labor witheits attendant capitalistic evils had corrupted

the natural goodness of man. And he says

Ce qu'il y a de plus\crue1 encore q'est que
tous 1es progres de l'espece humaine l'eloignant

 

22 "CinquiEme promenade."
23 ”I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" (1804).

85

sans cesse de son stat primitif plus nous
accumulons de nouvelles connaissances, et plus
nous nous‘Otons les mgxens d'acquerir 1a Plus
importante de toutes.

And

1a plupart de nos maux sont notre propre

ouvraae, et que nous les aurions presque
tous vites en ccnservant la maniere de

givre simple, uniforms at soliggire qui nous
tait prescrite par In nature.

Through the long march of civilization, the life of man,
as Rousseau saw it, has become muffled in systems of know-
ledge, systems of government, conventions of society. "He
lives mechanically, among artificially created custom, and
the real man seldom breaks through to find expression."‘?’£5
Rousseau bids us strip off these lifeless encumbrances
which the ages have accumulated and get back to what is
elemental, natural, and therefore essential in man. Sim-
ilarly Wordsworth:

Bumble and rustic life was generally chosen,
because, in that condition, the essential passions
of the heart find a better soil in which they can
attain their maturity, are less under restraint,
and speak a plainer and more emphatic language;
because in that condition of life our elementary
feelings coexist in a state of greater simplicity,
and, consequently, may be more accurateéy contem—
plated, and more forcibly communicated.

"Tout est bien, sortant des mains de 1'auteur des

 

‘4 Preface, Discours sur l'Origine g§_1flnégalite (1755).

25 £E§222£§_§2£_;fggigigg g; 1'Inégalite, Premiére partie.
36 Powell, _p. cit., p. 10.

27
1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads.

86

choses; tout degenEre entre les mains de l'homme." Leave
man's meddling, then and get back to things as they came
from God's hands: return to Nature. What did Rousseau
mean by nature? He meant different things at different
times, for he is full of contraditions. But, in the first
place, like Wordsworth, and perhaps even stronger than Words-
worth, he meant the country as Opposed to the town. A
child's education should begin with the education of his
senses: Enile's senses should be trained not in the smoke
and din of Paris, but among the pure sights and sounds of
the country, for Rousseau believed like COWper: "God made
the country, and man made the town." In the second place,
Rousseau meant what we call the simple life. Parisian
society is corrupt; but virtue still exists among the herds-
men of the Alps. Both these ideas are familiar to us from
Wordsworth, although Wordsworth invested nature wiflh a mys-
tical significance that was his own.

In Rousseau, Wordsworth may have found a doctrine
similar to his on the natural goodness of man. The doctrine
is asserted over and over again in Egglg. Man has a nat-
ural sense of right and wrong implanted in him by his con-
science. Likewise, Wordsworth believes throughout that man
has a choice between good and evil. In Lg Nouvelle Heloise,
Rousseau speaks of "1a douce voix de la Nature, qui reclame

au fond de tous les coeurs contre une orgueilleuse philoso-

 

87

phie."28 In Emile, he says that he finds his ethical prin-
, .

ciples "au fond de mon coeur ecrites par la.Nature en cap
racteres eneffacables." According to Rousseau, moral good-
ness is conformable to our nature:

81 1a bonté'morale est conforme'a notre nature,

l'homme ne saurait étre sain d'esprit ne bien

consitue, qu'autant qu'il est bon. Si elle ne

l'est pas et que l'homme soit mechant naturelle-

ment, 11 ne peut cesser de l'étre sans se cor-

rompre, et la bonte n'est en lue,qu'un vice contre

Nature.2 A
Wordsworth held with Rousseau "a love of primitive sim-
plicity and vegetative felicity."30

"Rousseau recogngzed that his own generation was
not fit to remodel institutions in which it had itself
grown up."31 We must look to the children for that. There-
fore in Emile, he sets forth a scheme of education which
might in time produce citizens to build the New Jerusalem
and worthy to dwell there.33 Like Wordsworth, Rousseau
believed that we should be interested in the child for what
he is now--a fresh, natural being—~rather than for what he
may become through training, and we must respect childhood

as an individual period:

1'
L'humanite a as place dans l'ordre des cnoses;
l'enfance a la sienne dans l'ordre de la vie

 

38 Cited in Beach, g2. ci ., p. 162.
39 Ibid.
so

babenroth, _p. cit., p. 250.
31 .
Grierson, 0p. cit., p. 288.

32
Ibid.

88

humaine; il faut considerer l'homme dans 1'homme

et l'enfant dans l'enfant. Assigner a.chacun as

place et l'y fixer.33
All through the second book of Emile, Rousseau dwells on
the value for young children of the knowledge that comes
to them through the senses in the course of mere animal
play. Wordsworth is in accord with him on this. And, he
would certainly agree with Rousseau's advice to the tutor
of Mme. d'Epinay's son:

"a child's character should not be changed;

besides, one could not do it if one would, and

the greatest success you could achieve would be

to make a hypocrite of him. . . No, sir, you

must make the best of the character Nature gave

him; that is all that is required of you."3
He would agree with Rousseau's theory of knowledge based on
direct Observation and with his idea that the child must be
free as nature made him: man must not interfere. For that
purpose, we may try the following rules: 1. Let him use
the little strengt: he has, in the assurance that he will
find.no way to abuse it; 2. Aid.him by supplying all the
strength he needs to satisfy his true wants; 3. Stop short
with the true wants and ignore all whim and fantasy; 4. Use
all care to make sure which are true wants and which are

fanciful.35 And it is here, perhaps, that Wordsworth devi-

ates from Rousseau, for the English poet suggests no such

 

33 Emile, Livre II.

34 From a translation of Jules Lemaitre, Jean-Jacaues
Rousseau by Jeanne Mairet, p. 218, as cited in Babenroth,
_p, cit., p. 261.

35 E. H. Wright, The Meaning 9: Rousseau, p. 42.

89

restraints. And in Rousseau's system, the child, though

r.

apparently free, is "followed, hourly watched, and [Horde-

worth may have felt] noosed."36 He no doubt would agree
with Rousseau that:
Comma tout ce qui entre dans l'entendement
humain y vient par les sens, la premi re
raison de l'homme est une ra'son sensitive;
c'est elle qui sert de base la raison
intellectuelle: nos premiers maltres de
philosophie sont nos pieds, nos mains, nos
yeux.
But Rousseau goes even farther and says:

Substituer des livres a tout cela, ce n'est pas
nous apprendre a raisonner, c'est nous apprendre
nous servir de la raison d'autrui; c'est nous

apprendg; B beaucoup croire, et a ne jamais rien

savoir.
IVordsworth did not believe that books could be substituted
for other necessary parts of learning but he felt that they,
too, had a place. For he sees that whatever contributes
to the child's develOpment on any side is education, yet
that the acquisition of book-learning constitutes but a
small part of this develOpment, and that an education main-
l1,bookish or intellectual is wrong.38 And the main thing
was that the child should not be "a dwarf Man"39 or "a

"40

miracle of scientific lore, but a normal boy; and yet

 

36
The Prelude, v, 232-9

Emile, Livre II.

8

3 Havens, 22, cit., pp. 376-7.
39 The Prelude, v, A 295.
40

Ibid., v, 315.

90

some systematic intellectual training he obviously took
for granted. To Wordsworth, education was ”everything
that draws out the human being, of which tuition, the
teaching or schools especially, however important,41 is
comparatively an insignificant part."42 And more and more
he felt that

The present bend of the public mind is to sacri-
fice the greater power to the less; all that life
and nature teach, to the little that can be learn-
ed from books and a master. . . The wisest of us
expect far too much from.school teaching. 3

Near the end of his life, in commenting upon an educational
report, he asked if

tee little value is not set upon the occupations

of Children out of doors. . . comparatively with
what they do or acquire in school? Is not the
Knowledge inculcated by the teacher, or derived un-
der his management, from.books, too exclusively
dwelt upon, so as almost to put out of sight that
which comes, without being sought for, from inter-
course with nature and from experience in the actu-
al employment and duties which a child's situation
in the Country, howevei unfavorable, will lead him
to or impose upon him, 4

He never felt that they should be ”noosed," but left

free to wander

 

4l-My italics.

42 Letter to H. J. Ross (1828). Cited in Havens, pp, cit.,
p. 378.

43 Ibid.

44 Letter to Seymour Tremenheere (1845) as cited.in.Harper,
.gp. cit., p. 348.

91

Through heights and hollows, and bye-Spots
of tales

Rich.with indigenous produce, Open groun 5

0f Fancy, happy pastures rang'd at will%

And to both Wordsworth and Rousseau, the evils of the age
‘were a result of industrialism. In his Discourse QQ'EEE'
Mora; Effect gg'thg Sciences and gagg, Rousseau regards
the evils of the age as the result of our deserting "that
happy state of ignorance in which the wisdom of providence
has placed us":

Let men learn for once that nature would have
preserved them from science, as a mother snatches

a dangerous weapon from the hands of her child.

Let them know that all the secrets she hides are

so many evils from which she protects them, and
that the very difficulty they find in acquiring
knowledge is not the least of her bounty towards
them. Men are perverse; but they would have been
far worse, if they had had the misfortune to be
born learned. . . . . Virtue: sublime science of
simple minds, are such industry and preparation'
needed if we are to know you? Are not your princi-
ples graven on every heart? Need we do more, to
learn your laws, than examine ourselves, and listen
to the voice of conscience, when the passions are
silent?46

Another quality of Rousseau is his intense individual-
ism, The political views of Rousseau, as stated, for examp
ple, in L3 Contrat Social are extremely individualistic,
yet considering his origins, it is easy to understand "his
restiveness under restraint, his horror of patronage, his

association of human strength, not with union among men,

 

45 The Prelude, v, A 235-7.
45 Cited in Fairchild, The Romantic guest, p. 112.

92

but with the wild and stern aspects of nature.“47 Words-
worth never went to the individualistic extreme in his love
of liberty. "And even wnen he was most rebellious against
the spirit of his bringing-up and his environment, he still
felt that social ties had something of the naturalness and
permanence of the external world."48
Wordsworth, as became a poet, did not separate his
mental processes. His reverie was more like reflection,
"it had more of the rational discursive quality than
Rousseau's; and his reasoning was less abstract, it never
lost touch with things and events."49
Yet he who believes that tillers of the soil and those
in walks of life but little removed from them--that is, the
majority of mankind--ere leading natural and therefore ra—
tional lives, and that their social laws are relatively
permanent, and therefore not wanting in authority, is not
likely to be made unhappy by the outbreak of a revolution
which promises to restore the artificially disturbed balance
of human powers and happiness. "Rousseau's message, not
withstanding the final gloom of his life, was one of glad-

ness. More than any other feature of the Revolution, Words—

worth, too, felt its joy."50

 

47 Harper, pp. cit., I, p. 133.
48 Ibid.

49 Ibid., p. 134.

50 Ibid.

CHAPTER FIVE
WORDSWORTH AND THE NOBLE SAVAGE TRADITION

In his book Th9 Ngblg Save 6, H. N. Fairchild defines
the Noble Savage as "any free and wild being who draws
directly from.nature virtues which raise doubts as to the
value of civilization."1 He suggests also that the term
may even be applied metaphorically to romantic peasants and
children when a comparison of their innocent greatness and
that of the savage illumines the thought of the period. Tra
Noble Savage represents a protest against the evil incidental
to human progress and looks yearningly back from the cor-
ruptions of civilization to an imaginary primeval innocence.
The idea of the Noble Savage depends upon belief in nature
as a norm.of innocence, simplicity, and spontaneity, and
upon belief in the instinctive goodness of man. According
to Fairchild, the earliest use of the term appeared 1n.Part
One of Dryden's Conguest 23 Granada, where Almanzor declares:

I am as free as Nature first made man,

Ere the base laws of servitude began,

When wild in woods the noble savage ran.2

In the whole body of eighteenth-century literature

before the French Revolution, one discerns a fairly steady

 

1 Page 2.

2 As quoted in Fairchild, The Noble Save e, p. 29.

94

growth of the attitude that civilization had strayed too
far from the simple rules which nature plants in the hearts
of all mankind. And the "noble savage" frequently appears
as an embodiment of this attitude. But the real importance
of these confrontations of savage and civilized humanity
lies in the fact that they indirectly stimulated reflection
upon "what man has made of man."

The first example in Tordsworth of what may be con-
sidered as an off shoot of the noble savage is in "Descrip-
tive Sketches":

As man in his primeval dower arrayed

The image of his glorious Sire displayed,
Even so, by faithful Nature guarded, here
The traces of primeval man appear;

The simple dignity no forms debase;
The eye sublime, the surly lion-grace.

3

(Yet we are convinced from a letter he wrote to Dorothy dur-

ing the tour that this was merely the use of a literary fad.)
"The complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman" was suggest-

ed by the reading of Hearne's Journey fggm_Hudson's §g1_tg

Egg Northern Qgggg, It is a poem about a sick squaw who

has been left to diein the snow. From his own note, we

know that he read Hearne's Journal "with interest.“ Notwith-

standing the fact that Wordsworth must have given some

thought to Indians in the writing of this poem, it certain-

ly cannot be considered as a glorification of savage life.

In "Her Eyes Are fiild" an "Indian bower" is mentioned;

 

3 Lines 489—444.

95

in "A Farewell," an "Indian shed." In Thg_Pre1ude, he
speaks again of Indians in urging the reader to

Think, how the everlasting streams and woods,

Stretched and still stretching far and Kids exalt

The roving Indian, on his desert sands.
And the Lake County woodman sleeps on the ground in his
cabin, like an Indian.5 In a late poem, "Presentiments,"
'Wordsworth addresses the spirit of prophetic intuition and
says

The naked Indian of the wild,

And haply too the cradled ghild,

Are pupils of your school.
To Fairchild, such fragments of evidence show that Words--
worth was mildly curious about Indians, and that he had ob-
tained some knowledge of their customs from travelers' ac-
counts.7 This does not, however, establish him as an ardent
admirer of the savage.

For the natural impulses of a primitive peOple had
little to offer Wordsworth. He feared and distrusted the

 

4 vii, 745-47. It is interesting to note that the refer-
ence to the Indian does not occur in the 1805 edition.
One may guess, however, that it was added not long after,
for the thought is certainly more characteristic of the
earlier than the later Wordsworth.

viii, 437.
5 Lines 34-36.
The Noble Sava e, p. 179.

96

sudden and violent in feeling:

the Gods appgove
The depth, and not the tumult, of the soul.

And although his view of the child and the peasant as
being particularly close to Nature and sharing in her wis-
dom is analogous to the rOmantic view of the savage, or
primitive man, wordsworth does not seem to have taken much
stock himself in this conception of the noble savage.9
Even Fairchild admits that "whether the Lake County shepherd
admired oy Wordsworth can be spoken of as a noble savage
even in a loose and figurative sense is doubtful."10 For
Wordsworth was never a lover of actual wildness in men or
institutions.

But fairchild is tempted to compare the noble savage
and the noble peasant. They are sihilarly~motivated; both
reflect a revulsion against "what man has made of man."

Both preach the gospel of nature worship, innocent simplici-
ty, and anti-intellectualism. “They are related also in
that Wordsworth's conception of the shepherd is influenced
by Rousseau's conception of natural man, which in turn

owes something to the noble savage tradition."11

As the eighteenth century progressed, the conventional

pastoral gave place more and more to sympathetic portrayals

 

8 "Laodamia,"lines 73—75.

9 Beach, _p. cit., pp. 202-3.
10

1
1 Ibid., p. 153.

The Romantlg Quest, p. 152.

97

of English country life. Even in fiordsworth, the peasant
is idealized as well as realized. "The simple shepherd is
made the vehicle for the increasingly pOpular notions
about the wickedness of cities and the desirability of
innocent contentment in the lap of nature."12 But there is
a striking difference. iordsworth's noble peasant is far
more than mere ignorance of civilized 00mplexities. His
direct contact with the "wisdom and spirit of the universe"
gives him a positive happiness and a positive goodness.13
Far from being free, his Spirit is constantly chastened by
the discipline of nature. And "far from being in sentimental
quest of some UtOpia, turning away from the reality that
disciplines by constraint and limitation, it was precisely
from the contemplation of nature that he drew a sense of
the necessity of constraint and limitations."14 But Michael
is more like a wise old sachem than like any figure of the
pastoral tradition.15
The child of nature might be considered another off-
shoot of the noble savage tradition. And in the early
period, the beauty of the little cottage girl, who was
"wildly clad," made Wordsworth glad.15 And he saw fit sub-

 

12 Ibid., p. 152.

 

13 Fairchild, The Noble Savage, p. 181.

14 Joseph Beach, "Reason and Nature in Wordsworth," Journal

9: the Historygf_Ideas, 1, p. 341.

15 Fairchild, The Romantic “uest, p. 180.

"fie Are Seven".

98

jects for poetry in the child of nature who "dwelt among
the untrodden ways."

The child of nature is perhaps harmoniously related
to the Noble Savage. The‘influence of scenery sometimes
operates on the savage as it does on the child. Moreover,
boys and girls who, in poetry or in actual life, grow up a—
mong natural objects, are frequently likened to little
savages. To both types, simplicity, instinctive goodness
and seclusion from evil influences are common. "We may at
least say, then, that the Noble Savage gives something to
the child of nature, and that the child of nature gives
something to the Noble Savage.“17

_The savage, the peasant, and the child were all in-
troduced as examples of the good of a purer realm. This
something higher is best reached by lying close to the heart
of nature in the wigwam, the sheephold or the cradle--so
close in Wordsworth that the happy savage or dalesman or
child "feels the divine impulse which sets the heart of
nature throbbing with love and beauty."18

But like many other romantic writers, Jordsworth drew
both from tradition and from travelers' narratives informa-
tion which he found in agreement with his beliefs in the
benefits of a natural life. In "A Morning Exercise" he

mentions "naked Indians," and cites in a.footnote Waterton's

 

17 Fairchild, The Noble Savage, p. 385.

18 Fairchild, The Romantic guest, p. 164.

99

wanderings_in South America. In the Excursion, certain
mountain plants are compared to "Indian‘mats."19 And in the
poem "To a Young Lady," he says that
an old age serene and bright,
And lovely as a Lapland night
Shall lead thee to thy grave.20
Most of his illustrations were gathered from sources

nearer at hand, but he reCOgnized to some extent the value
of more exotic evidence. "When the fervor of his naturalism
chilled, he yet retained a saddened longing for simplicity
and occasionally thought of the savage as an example of the

mind's lost innocence.”l

 

19 Fairchild, The Noble Savage, p. 190.

30 Lines 16-18.

2
1 Ibid., p. 181.

CHAPTER SIX
CONCLUSION

There can be no doubt that Nordsworth was a philo-
sOphical poet. There are many parts to his philosophy,
many of them at times at variance with other parts. And,
although I do not believe that Nordsworth would ever have
considered his poetry primitivistic, there are many ideas
present in his poetry, e8pecia11y in the early period, that
smack of primitivism.

"Primitivism is the exaltation of a state of life in_
which man depends on his natural powers exerted in a simple
society and an uncomplicated environment, rather than on a
high degree of training and on an environment greatly modi-
fied by civilization. Primitivism thus presupposes some
form of the theory of man‘s natural goodness, whether this
be taken to reside in instinct, common sense, Spontaneous
feeling, or in some or all of these."1

"Wordsworth held the romantic faith that in spontane-
ous feeling the essential qualities of man were revealed."2
He shared the eighteenth-century tendency to regard sensi-
bility as an evidence of virtue. His praise of Shaftes-

bury is characteristic of this attitude. His preoccupa-

 

1 A. D. Me KilIOp, English Literature from Dryden p_ Burns,

p. 361.

 

 

2 Powell, pp, ci ., p. 149.

101

tion with emotions inSpired by and sometimes identified
with natural beauty, his cultivation of the rapture and
enthusiasm of the nature-lover, is a less stilted and forma—
lized edition of Shaftesbury. Both Wordsworth and Shaftes-
bury would agree that inspiration is a app; feeling of the
divine presence and that this presence is most readily felt
in the "retired places" of Nature. "And fiordsworth's faith
in human nature is at least partially founded upon the be—
lief, which he holds throughout his greatest period, that
human impulses are trustworthy, if only they are enlightened
so that the full consequences of their realization are
manifest to the agent who entertains them."3 He firmly
believed in man's natural goodness.

And yet it is perfectly clear in many of Wordsworth's
poems that he does not believe that the modern man is being
"natural." Political and social conditions of England dis-
turbed him a great deal. He was against the commercializ-
ing, materializing tendency of his day. He felt that a
shadow calling itself "good sense" had chased away sensi-
bility, and he lamented this.4 ,ipp Lyrical Ballads have this
philoSOphical undercurrent. "It is now admitted that they
hold a protest against the out-and-out rationalism of the

day, and more particularly against the form it had assumed

 

3 Stallknecht, Strgnge Seas pf_Tnought, p.11.

4 See Ch. II, pamphlet on The Convention pf Cintra.

102

in Godwin's Political Justice."5 That many poems of the

 

collection are so directed can scarcely be questioned, and
this protest was and remains the chief inner novelty of
the book. "Guilt and Sorrow" was a distinctively morbid
attack on the whole social order, and especially against
the criminal law and capital punishment. "The Female
Vagrant,” later incorporated into "Guilt and Sorrow," shows
much of Wordsworth's reforming Spirit with its fierce de-
nunciation of war and warriors:
the brood
That lap (their very nourishmentt) their brother's
blood.6
or of the iniquitous distribution of wealth in society:
And homeless near a thousand homes I stood,
And near a thousand tables pined, and wanted
feed.
More charity is to be-found among robbers than among the
rich:
The wild brood saw me weep, my fate enquired,
And gave me food, and refit, more welcome, more
desired.

"The Convict" is an onset against capital punishment. In

 

5 Emile Legouis, "The Lyrical Ballads of 1798," Wordswgth
and Coleridge: Studies lg honorgpg George McLean.Har er,

p. 8.

5 Cited in Emile Legouis, "The Lyrical Ballads of 1798,"
Wordsworth and Coleridge, p. 10.

7 Ibid.
8 XLV, 404-405.

 

103

a less tragic way several other poems censure the harshness
of the social law or the lack among men of feeling for their
fellow man. Goody Blake can make no fire in the coldest
winter unless she steals sticks from the hedge of her hard-
hearted neighbor Harry Gill. Poor Martha Ray, about to
become a mother, is forsaken by Stephen Hill; she kills

her baby and becomes half-witted. In "The Last of the
Flock" we are asked to pity a.father of ten reduced by
poverty to sellall his sheep one by one.9

Even in poems dedicated to nature, dordsworth hints
at the deplorable condition of society. In "Lines Kritten
in Early Spring," he contrasts the happiness and beauty of
a grove with what "man has made of man." In "Tintern Abbey,"l
his thoughts occasionally turn from the harmony of nature
to listen "to the still sad music of humanity,” and he
counts among the evils of this world "the sneers of selfish
men" and "greetings where no kindness is.“ To me, these
are all examples of chronological primitivism.

The impulse underlying primitivism is either the desire
to escape from a corrupt and 80phisticated society, or the
desire to reform such an existing civilization by bringing
it into conformity with an ideal of virtuous simplicity.

It seems to me that Wordsworth did both. He did not want

to stay in London, where he was constantly amazed at the

 

9 Emile Legouis, "The Lyrical Ballads of 1798," Wordsworth
pnd Coleridge, p. 10.

104

vice and corruption which he saw there. And he escaped
such s0phisticated society not only in his own life but in
the life he wrote about. Instead of the "getting and spends
ing," the laying waste of all life to the attainment of a
distant purpose, the savour is in the "mere living":

my blood appeared to flow
From its own pleasure.

It is this joy in the sheer act of living which Wordsworth
chiefly loves in Nature. His heroes are the hare who runs
races in her mirth, the kitten playing with the falling
leaves, birds, "whom for the very sake of love we love,"
and the Idiot Boy, "with his power of unadulterated joy
without forethought or after-thought."11 From such associ-
ates there comes to him ”a happy genial influence," and a
freedom for his natural impulses of love, and escape from
the anxieties and ambitions of 00mp168 social life and

the fear that kills;
And hope that is unwilling to be fed.

Yet he is forever conscious that good men, the genuine
"wealth of nations," are not easy to find:

I could not but inquire,
Not with less interest than heretofore, .
But greater, though in spirit more subdued,
Why is this glorious Creafgre to be found
One only in ten thousand?

 

1° The Prelude, ii, 187.

11 Powell, pp. pit., p. 133.

12"Resolution and Independence."

13 The Prelude, xii, A 87-91.

105

He felt that if this good man was to be found any where on
earth he was to be found in the man close to nature:

--Let good men feel the soui of nature
And see things as they are. 4

and

For lowly shepherd‘s life is best!15
for this man

has a true relish of simplicity, and therefore

stands the best chance of being happy; at least,

without it there is no happiness, because

there can be no true sense of the bounty

and beauty of the creation, or insight into

the constitution of the human mind. 5

"Wordsworth's ideal woman was not a social butterfly,

or a.social leader, or a masterful clubwoman, or a.political
campaigner, or a clinging vine, or a useless angel; but an
incarnation of spirituality, benignity, sympathy, homeebred

"17 His ideal man "not

sense, foresight, and patience.
a dull-witted Sportsman or a hustling business-man, or a
roystering adventurer, or an ambitious seeker after fame,
or a plppp worldling, or a milksOp, or a self-righteous

reformer of others; but a generous spirit, devout, gentle

compassionate, studious and thoughtful, firm in char-

 

14
15
16

"Peter Bell," Part Third, 29-30.
"Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle," 86.

Letter to George Beaumont Oct., 1905; The Early Letters g;
fig. and Dorothy Wordswortp, ed. by de Selincourt, p. 525.‘

7 _
1 E. Bernbdum, §_Guide Through the Romantic Movement, p.

145.

106

acter and of high purpose, self—forgetful, and ambitious
only to help good prevail."18 In both men and women,
Wordsworth thought, a virtue even nobler than compassion
was fortitude, 1.8., the courageous and uncomplaining en—
durance of the toils, trials, and sdversities inevitable in '
human existence.
Nature had a benign influence on such peeple:
And grossly that man errs, who should suppose

That the green valleys, and the streams and rocks,
Were things indifferent to the Shepherd's thoughts. .

Those fields, those hills-what could they less?
had laid

Strong hold of his affections, were to him

A.pleasurable feeling of blind love,

The pleasure which there is in life itself.19
There can be little doubt that this enthusiasm which Words—
worth has for rural scenes and simple folk is a primitivis-
tic and sentimental conception of nature.

The same is true of his treatment of idiots and crazy
peOple. In them he sees a faculty of intensive feeling, of
instinctive insight, moral good. There is a deep element
of love and essential feelings. He even suggests that there
exists perhaps in such peOple an inner fountain of Divine
Nisdom.and that "their life is hidden with God." They
possess the principle of life: they possess instinct. Is

this not indeed primitivistic?

 

18 Ibid.

19 Lines 62-64; 74-77.

 

107

Also Wordsworth believes that the divine is inherent
in the heart of a child, as is an intuitive sense of good-
ness and truth. The child is held.up as an example of
simple, if not divine, contentment. In 1802, Wordsworth
wrote

My heart leaps up when I behold
. A rainbow in the sky:

80 was it when my life began;

80 is it now I am a man;

So be it when I shall grow old,

Or let me die!

The Child is father of the Man;

And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each in natural piety.

There are many poems in which he extols the sacredness and
the divinity of childhood. ILater, he broke this chain of
natural piety, or reverence for the unspoiled instincts of
childhood and youth. And yet even in “Ode to Duty," the
poet cannot forget the innocent souls who by their birth-
right, their divine heritage of essential goodness, live

"without reproach or blot, as the following stanza, which was

later cancelled, shows:

There are those who tread a blameless way
— In purity, and love, and truth,

Though resting on no better stay

Than on the genial sense of youth:

Glad Hearts! without reproach or blot;

Who do the right and know it not:

May joy be theirs while life shall last

And may a genial sense remain when Youth

is past.2 .
He gate up or greatly modified.the "genial faith, still rich

in genial good," which guided his ybunger days. And yet

 

30 Cited in Harper, 9_p_. cit., II, p. 117.

108

He realized himself the loss which came with such a change
in feeling:

But yet I know, where'er I go,
That there aith passed away a glory from the
earth.

Nordsworth is primitivistic in that he is opposed to
progress to a certain extent. "Even in nature, it was the
simple, the abiding, and the changeless for which he cared
most deeply."23 Nature's richest ministrations, he tells
us, are found "chiefly where appear host obviously simplic-
ity and power,"23 not beauty. And in the earlier version,
Michael, parting from his son at the sheepfold, said:

let this sheep-fold be
Thy anchor and thy shield; amid all fear
And all temption, let it be to thee
An emblem of the life thy Fathers lived.

Later, Aordsworth changed this to

thgzk of me, my Son,
And of this moment.

This was the Wordsworth who had lived to see

A new and unforeseen creation rise

From out the labours of a peaceful Land
Wielding her potent enginery to frame

And to produce, with appetite as keen

As that of war, which rgsts not night or day,
.Industrious to destroy. 5

 

31 "Intimations Ode," 17-19.

22 Sneath, g2. cit., p. 48.

33 The Prelude, xii, 252.

24 “Michael," 406.

25 1h§_Excursion, vii, 89-95.

109

Practically all of the elements had been utilized to bring
about this change. The result, of course, had been to
make England one of the greatest markets of the world, and
a power to be reSpected and feared. But at what price? At
the eXpense of the spoliation of Nature, and the bodily and
moral welfare of the peOple. These are the fruits of the
manufacturing spirit, and Wordsworth deplores them.

that hOpe rises from the new order of things? Worden
worth decided to look I

‘For present good in life's familiar face, 26
And built thereon my hOpes of good to come.’

One might also look to rustic peeples, for

A few strong instincts and a few plain rules
Among the hersdmen of the Alps, have wrought
More for mankind at this unhappy day 27
Than all the pride of intellect and thought.

And dordsworth tries to cure the existing woes by refining
the sense of pity and sympathy. Sensibility stands with
him in the place of mere legic; his weapons are feeling
and "the language of the sense." For he believes that

'T is Nature's law
That none, the meanest of created things,
0r forms created the most vile and brute,
The dullest or most noxious, should exist
Divorced from good-—a spirit and pulse of good,
A life and soul, to every mode of being
Inseparably linked. Then be assured
That least of all can aught-—that ever owned
The heaven-regarding eye and front sublime
Which man is born to--sink, howe'er depressed,

 

36 The Prelude, xii, 62-63.

27 "Alas! What Boots the Long Laborious Quest," 11—14.

110

So low as to be scorned without asin;28

The essential universality of goodness is affirmed. But

he never gets away from the fact that man may be found at
his best where his life is most simple--where the conven-
tionalities, customs, and institutions of society have not
rendered it artificial and complex. Among rural folk we

may find human nature in its essential, universal, elemantal
life, better than anywhere.

Nowhere (or is it fancy?) can be found

The one sensation that is here; 't is here,
Here as it found its way into my heart

In childhood, here as it abides by day,

night, here only; or in chosen minds

That take it with them hence, where'er they go.
--'T is, but I cannot name it, 't is the sense
Of majesty, and beauty, and repose,

A blended holiness of earth and sky,

Something that makes this individual spot,
This small abiding-place of many men,

A termination, and a last retreat,

A centre, come from wheresoe'er you will,

A whole without dependence or defect,

Made for itself, and happy in itseég,

Perfect contentment, Unity entire.

"And here, deepite all of the mental, moral, and spiritual
infirmity disclosed, we find that fundamentally our humani-

' ty has worth."50 The inner nature is good; and Man's potenti-
alities are such that, under proper conditions, they will
unfold to his credit, and he will achieve a worthy destiny

under God.

 

28 "The Old Cumberland Beggar," 73-84.
29 The Recluse, 136-151.

30 Sneath, op, cit., p. 304.

111

Thus in flordsworth
We have traced the stream

From the blind cavern whence is faintly heard

Its natal murmur; followed it to light

And open day; accompanied its course

Among the ways of Nature, for a time

Lost sight of it bewildered and engulphed;

Then given it greeting as it rose once more

In strength, reflecting from its placid breast

The works of man and face of human life;

And lastly, from its progress have we drawn

Faith in life endless, the sustaining thought

Of human Being, Eternity, and God.31
The glow from this enthusiasm kindled the flame of "an ide-
alism which varied much in its expression and even seemed
to belie itself in belying its first forms, before it de-
clined with age. But it was never completely extinguished,
preserving as it did until the end a radiating power that
was still effective."32 And because the spirit of Nature
is the divine spirit, Wordsworth cares about the common
life of her several creatures. The goodness of the life
of the senses is a vital element. Whether it is known in
the happy natural life of flowers, beasts, unsOphisticated
peOple, those devoid of all intellectual light, children,
or in its power to paint in precious detail for mankind the
aspirations of the soul to majesty, its vivid joy is what
keeps Wordsworth's philosophy alive. "As its glory passes

from the earth, his poetry fades into anybody's moralizing."33

 

2 Legouis and Oazamian, History 2;_English Literature. p.
1035. -

33 Powell, _p, oi ., p. 132.

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112
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Room use; my

 

 

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