Wordsworth’s Personal Dullness

The Strange Case of William Wordsworth is to me of perennial interest, and I have just emerged from several days’ burrowing under Professor C. G. Harper’s two enormous volumes entitled William Wordsworth, His Life, Works, and Influence. It is a conscientious and valuable piece of work, very fully documented, and containing much out-of-the-way information and a great deal of sensible, if not always illustrious, criticism. The information may perhaps be a little too ample for the weaker brethren. The map (showing lakes, mountain ranges (brown) and so on) of Wordsworth’s country with which we open gives the clue to Professor Harper’s exhaustive method. Every procurable date of Wordsworth’s continental programme is copied out; and we are even supplied with the winter and summer timetables of the Grammar School at Hawkshead which he attended and at which (as Professor Harper rather sententiously observes) an education different in kind, but perhaps not inferior in quality, to that supplied by Eton was bestowed upon him. New light is thrown on certain incidents in his career; his “circle” is elaborately described; and a very charming picture is given of his sister Dorothy. But the old problem of Wordsworth’s defects remains much where it did.

It is a commonplace that Wordsworth is the most uneven of great poets. Every textbook writer tells one that when he was inspired he was a giant, that when he was not he wrote maundering doggerel, and that he himself never knew when he was and when he was not at his best. The Idiot Boy has been held up to the ridicule of generations—beyond its deserts perhaps. The point was most forcibly put by J. K. Stephen when he wrote a parody of Wordsworth’s “Two voices are there,” saying that one of the voices was that of the sea, etc., and the other that of “an old half-witted sheep.” But a thing less frequently faced, and never, as far as I know, properly explained, is his personal lack of attractiveness. Flippant persons may be met who dismiss him as “a pompous old dullard”; but, generally speaking, whenever one hears such a remark it comes from some one who openly confesses that he cannot stand Wordsworth’s poetry at any price, and that he has very seldom attempted to read it. The people who are in difficulties are those (and I am among them) who agree without qualification that Wordsworth is our greatest poet since Milton, but who cannot sincerely say that they are drawn towards him as a man. If they—any one who does not feel like this is happy and I do not speak for him—pretend to be fond of him their pretence is glaring. If they do not stick up for him they feel that they are being faithless to a poet who still stands in need of all the propagandists he can get. It is not easy to face the truth about him even in the solitude of one’s own chamber. But, by heaven, he is a dull man!

“There was a boy” (as Wordsworth would himself begin) who at one time used nightly to dine in hall under a large oil-painting of the poet. In this painting Wordsworth was represented sitting on a rock against a landscape background which was an agreeable and symbolical blend of wildness and tranquillity. The poet was clad in broadcloth; he held a book in his hand; his face was smooth and pink; and his mild eye surveyed the spectator as though the latter were a lamb about to receive a pat of the hand and his blessing. There he sat, meditative and benevolent, while the soup gave place to the fish and the fish to the beef; and when one had drained off the last dregs of one’s beer one went off still conscious of that meditative and benevolent eye. It became almost maddening. Every other great English poet had something fascinating about him. Even Milton, in spite of certain unsociable qualities, had a certain attractive force, a touch of the virulent, and the scars of suffering. But this Wordsworth! His genuine philanthropy was unquestionable. His portrait might, one thought, be that of a pioneer of the Anti-Slave Trade Agitation, or an inventor of Sunday Schools, or an endower of Bands of Hope. But not a poet; oh, not a poet!

So it is with all his portraits. Professor Harper gives a selection of them. Always the sage is a bland and upright man; the mens conscia recti typified. But never a sign of eloquence or fire; of the magnificent oratory of his great passages, of the music and profound tenderness which are so profuse in his poetry. Not a sign of stress; not a mark of any but the most complacent vicarage thought; no passion, no enthusiasm, no challenge, and no response. It is not to be explained away, as Professor Harper attempts to explain it away, by saying that the myth of “Daddy Wordsworth” (as FitzGerald called him) is based on a disproportionate view of his life. Professor Harper thinks that far too little attention has been paid to his early revolutionary period, when the ideals of the French Revolution gripped him, and far too much to his later period of orthodoxy and respectability. Professor Harper himself attempts to redress the balance. He gives as full an account as he can of the earlier Wordsworth and of his relations with Revolutionary France. But, as Wordsworth’s French friends would have said (provided they were not ashamed of using such a worn-out tag) plus ça change plus c’est la même chose. The early Wordsworth may have been a different being; but Professor Harper certainly does not prove that he was. From birth to death in this biography he appears as the same high-minded, staid, sober, solemn monument. He joined in the Revolution not so much a “kid-glove revolutionary” as a woollen-glove and warm comforter revolutionary. Had he stayed in France he might have made even the Terror respectable.

On myself and on others Wordsworth’s portraits and his biographies always leave this sort of impression: the impression of an old bore to whom one would not be rude simply and solely because one would not willingly hurt the feelings of a person so worthy. And then one goes back to his poetry—and his prose—and hears a voice of almost unsurpassed grandeur speaking the deepest of one’s unexpressed thoughts, appealing to and drawing out all the divinest powers in man’s nature. Of his greatness surely no rational and unbiassed being could entertain the slightest doubt. He is not so popular or so frequently read as some poets, and that is not difficult to explain. His absence of humour, or an equivalent vivacity, is not in itself an explanation; but the accompanying general absence of any luxurious appeal to the senses is. He speaks direct to the labouring intellect and the sensitive heart; and the enjoyment of him, if great, is usually enjoyment of the austerer kind, like mountain-climbing. There is nothing soft or enervating or luxurious which can make reading him an æsthetic debauch. He does not often sing to a tune which gives one pleasure even if one does not attend to the words. Without being in the least obscure he demands an effort from the reader parallel to his own. That, at least as much as the tediousness of many of his writings (and his irritating classification of them), is the reason of his comparative lack of popularity. But ...