language the change between 1792 and 1832 is not so much. one of sympathy as one of power. Of this Wordsworth, of the poet who saw more, believed more, loved more than other men, it is simply untrue to say, as Mr. Harper says, that in the second half of his life he cursed what he once blessed and blessed what he once cursed'. The truth of that saying is entirely confined to the contrast between the writer who complacently echoed political theorists in his youth and the writer who illtemperedly echoed frightened property owners later on. A poet, or indeed any author, may fairly claim to be judged by what is unique and his own, and not by what is commonplace, in his writings. Tried by that test, Wordsworth cannot be said to have deserted a cause which he never embraced. What moved him in the French Revolution was not its abstract theories but its passion of life, its energy of love and hope and faith in the future of man. And never, even in any of his prose, or any of it that counts, did he renounce that sympathy. After all, which of his prose writings do count? Those in which the unique soul of the man is visibly present; those in which that heart, at once so fiery and so tender, that inward eye of spiritual vision which saw, as perhaps no other man ever saw, into the life both of man and of Nature, make themselves plainly heard in passionate and musical language such as no mere opinions ever found for themselves. And that means the Cintra Tract, the Prefaces, the Letter to Wilson, the Essay upon Epitaphs, the Letter to a Friend of Robert Burns. But it does not mean the reply to Bishop Watson, a mere piece of Radical polemics, nor its Tory counterpart, the Address to the Freeholders of Westmorland. It is the same with the poetry. Whenever Wordsworth is a true poet, whether in age or youth, he rejoices in the free, loving, wise, passionate, spirit of man; and though Nature, as he himself tells us, had 'tamed' him, and led him, as she leads her turbulent streams, down from life's mountains to its quiet meadows, yet he has not forgotten his desperate course of tumult and of glee, and is still pleased, 'more than a wise man ought to be', when he reads a tale Of two brave vessels matched in deadly fight And fighting to the death'. And, though age cannot be youth, and already at thirty-seven he is turning from the nightingale's 'fiery heart' and 'tumultuous harmony' to prefer the stockdove's song, Slow to begin, and never ending; Of serious faith and inward glee; That was the song-the song for me! yet the 'glee' remained, if now more inward than outward ; and so did the poet's faith in the heart of man as a thing possessing a life utterly above and beyond the limitations of wealth or earthly conditions. He could no longer often express it as he had once, and it had become oftener 'serious' and pensive than tumultuous' and 'fierce'; but it was still in him. The Leech-Gatherer and The Cumberland Beggar are far greater poems than that about the Old Man and the Robin written in 1846; but the unique Wordsworthian sympathy with the heart of the poor is as plain in this as in its greater predecessors. It is in 1845 that the venerable Tory breaks out in praise of the 'equal rights and simple honesty' of the early Pennsylvanians; and it is in one of the last Fenwick Notes, so constantly, ungratefully, and unjustly belittled by Mr. Harper (what would we not give for similar notes by Shelley, even if written by an elderly Shelley who had ceased to believe that all the ills of the world come from the crimes of priests and kings ?), that the poet, breaking out, as so often, against the inhumanity of the factory system, cries, 'Oh for the reign of justice, and then the humblest man among us would have more power and dignity in and about him than the highest have now!' There are one or two partial and transient recognitions in Mr. Harper of this essential unity of spirit which lay deep under Wordsworth's superficial changes of opinion. But it did not suit him to give more; and his book loses by its emphasis being laid not on the important but on the unimportant. The fact that Wordsworth was for a very few years a republican cannot justify a man in turning his Life into a book of republican propaganda, any more than the fact that Gladstone was for a short time a strong Conservative would justify any one who should make his biography a continuous attack upon Victorian Liberalism. But that is substantially what Mr. Harper has done. His book is far fuller of politics than of poetry; and it is not, and never will be, of politics that wise men will chiefly think when they hear the name of Wordsworth. Yet Wordsworth disputes with Shakespeare and Milton the glory of being the greatest political name in the long line of our poets. There is, perhaps, in Shelley a finer purity of political passion than in any of the three; but Shelley's vision was set on changeless ideas and abstractions and not on those temporary, local, partial, and changing embodiments of ideas which are the stuff of politics. The real Europe, the real Greece, Rome, England, he could not see, as those others, and notably Wordsworth, could and did. Wordsworth went through a period when, as we have seen, under the influence of the French Revolution he approached politics from this side of abstractions. And it is this moment in his life on which Mr. Harper lays all his stress. what is notable about it is that it produced little or no great poetry dealing with political subjects. That came later, when he had seen the cause of Liberty embodied in the struggle of his own country against the lawless despotism of Napoleon. And when we speak of him as a political poet, it is necessarily of this period that we chiefly think, because it and it alone produced great poetry. Yet of this poetry But Mr. Harper scarcely speaks at all. Eight or ten of his nine hundred pages are all that he gives to it. And these contain at least one strange impertinence : 'I attach only the smallest consequence', says Mr. Harper, speaking of The Happy Warrior, to the note appended to the poem in the edition of 1807 stating that the death of Lord Nelson "directed the Author's thoughts to the subject", even though it is supported by a long Fenwick Note to the same effect, and by a letter from Southey to Scott, dated February 4, 1806' (ii. 119). Was there ever a more arrogant defiance of unpalatable truth? Mr. Harper does not like war or its heroes; he does not wish to admit that Wordsworth paid honour to Nelson; and therefore neither the express, contemporary and public declaration of the poet himself, confirmed though it be by a note dictated in his old age, nor the equally contemporary evidence of a letter written by Southey to Scott, who, after all, were not only both Wordsworth's friends but both poets, is to be held of any consequence whatever when weighed in the balance against Mr. Harper's prejudices! It may be as well that Mr. Harper leaves this side of Wordsworth alone, for his total lack of sympathy with it would have made any chapter he might have written on it a predestined failure. Perhaps the war has opened his eyes, as it has opened the eyes of so many, to the sacred duty laid upon the free to repel the enemies of freedom with all their strength and at the cost, if need be, of their lives. But when he wrote this book he was perfectly blind to all that, and a bitter enemy of the mildest exhibitions of a warlike spirit. In October 1803, when an invasion was expected, Dorothy Wordsworth wrote to Mrs. Clarkson that the poet had become a volunteer, and that 'surely there never was a more determined hater of the French, nor one more willing to do his utmost to destroy them if they really do come'. Most lovers of Wordsworth will be proud both of the act and of the feeling which inspired it. But Mr. Harper considers it 'odious to see him in a bloodthirsty mood!' The truth is that Mr. Harper, at least when he has a pen in his hand, is a Godwinian rationalist to whom emotion is anathema, to whom any one man is as important as another, for whom 'social virtue consists, not in the love of this or the other individual, but in the love of man'. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was a complete human being, feeling as well as thinking, willingly yielding to local and personal attachments, and making no pretence that his brother was not more to him than another man, or England than France. He said some of the hardest words that have ever been said of England, and he could even rejoice in her defeat when he believed her to be fighting in an unholy cause. But his joy was never that of the abstract and cosmopolitan rationalist. It was a joy mixed with an agony of pain; the joy of a man who goes to the scaffold for his country, or, more nearly, of one who changes his faith, knowing that in doing so he stabs the mother whom he loves to the heart. The misery that Wordsworth suffered between 1793 and 1795 or 1796 was that of a tragic struggle between his heart and his mind. For the moment, the thoughts mastered the feelings; and with silent despair in his heart he tried to live in the belief that an abstract liberty, equality and fraternity could take for men the place of the old humanities of father, son and brother, friend and lover and fellow-countryman. As he himself tells us in The Prelude, he Zealously laboured to cut off [his] heart he believed and hoped that future times would surely see The man to come parted, as by a gulph, |