That is, at the bidding, as he says, of 'syllogistic words he gave up all hold on reality and in particular on the two ideas of continuity and locality or nationality which are the very foundation of the art of politics. The heart of man will not endure to be cut off from all the sources of her strength'; if it is so cut off, it dies. So Wordsworth found, as he tossed in a sea of insoluble questions, from which he was only rescued, first by devoting his faculty of pure reasoning to its proper sphere--that world of abstract science where disturbances of human will and power... find no admission '—and then by listening to old influences that had moved his heart from childhood, and above all to his sister Dorothy and to Nature, who led him back To those sweet counsels between head and heart from which alone grows 'genuine knowledge fraught with peace'. The story has often been told; never so well, after the poet's own account, as by M. Legouis in his admirable Jeunesse de Wordsworth. There is nothing better in his book than the chapter in which he shows the progress of! Wordsworth's deliverance from Godwin's intellectual abstractions according to which it was absurd to pretend that an honest ploughman' could be as virtuous as Cato'. Abstract man gradually faded from the poet's mind; and man as he is attracted his interest instead. And, as he closely watched the poor about him and saw how much inherited customs and memories and affections meant to them, he gradually restored to the real man, as M. Legouis says, 'one by one, the feelings of which ideal man had been stripped by Godwin'. And so, mind and heart consenting together, great poetry came from him. But not yet great political poetry. For in that field mind and heart did not yet consent together. So long as the mind judged that France was fighting for, and England against, the cause of liberty and justice, while the heart remained as intensely English as it always was from his first day to his last, great poetry, which demands the union of mind and heart, could not come from Wordsworth. The change began to come in 1798, when the French first attacked Switzerland. The next year Napoleon became First Consul. But it was not till 1802 that the great political poetry began. In that year Napoleon became First Consul for life; and France openly ceased to be a free country. In that year Napoleon sent Ney into Switzerland and assumed the attitude of a lord paramount of that country, which was to lead to graver interferences later on. In that year also Wordsworth renewed his interest in politics by visiting France during the peace. When he landed at Calais, he wrote the Sonnet Fair Star of Evening', with which Mr. Acland opens his useful and excellently edited little volume of Patriotic Poems. The poet looked across to England: There! that dusky spot Beneath thee, that is England; there she lies. While there, he denounced the crowd of English whom he saw hurrying 'to bend the knee In France, before the new-born Majesty', and declared that 'truth', 'sense', and 'liberty' were flown from the new France. A week or two later he was at Dover again. His heart beat high at all he saw; for all was England and all was free. The two loves were now one. Here, on our native soil, we breathe once more. All, all are English. Oft have I looked round Europe is yet in bonds; but let that pass, The unity of mind and heart was attained, the choice taken; and now the political poetry could begin. A few weeks ago,1 at a conference of the English Association, a bookseller was telling his audience that one of the effects of the war was an increased sale of poetry, and especially of the poetry of Wordsworth. There can be no doubt, as indeed he said, that this is partly due to Mr. Acland's little book, with its interesting introduction and the excellent historical notes which face the poems on the opposite pages, an arrangement as convenient and pleasant as it is original. But it must also be due to the peculiar nature of Wordsworth's patriotic poetry. It is not too much to say that it reads as if it were written for us to-day. Splendid as are Shakespeare's outbursts in Henry the Fifth and King John, we cannot quite feel that of them. The wars he had to deal with were mere duels of nations, in which the interest we take is simply a pride in seeing the victory of our own. Except the fighting itself there is nothing great about them, no cause, no idea, nothing of the universal soul of man. But in this war-far more even than in the great struggle with Napoleon-everything great in life seems to be at stake. And it is natural, it is even inevitable that we should go back for comfort and courage in it to the poet who could not sound the trumpet till he could put his faith and vision into the blast it was to give the poet who 1 Written in the spring of 1916. 2 The Patriotic Poetry of William Wordsworth. A Selection (with Introduction and Notes). By Right Hon. A. H. D. Acland. Clarendon Press, 1915. cried, as he looked on the narrow waters that lie between England and France : Winds blow, and waters roll, These were not mere phrases in Wordsworth's mouth. He meant every syllable of them. It was the very core of his faith that, if we will let her, Nature strengthens and purifies our soul; and that the only kind of greatness worth having is that of the soul. That is the key to his attitude all through these years; and it is what lifts his message far above its immediate occasion. He has nothing to recant. He never changed his view that the original war against the French Republic was a sin against the light. But when once France had, as he believed, given her soul away, when she had betrayed the cause of freedom and sold her honour to a despot for a blare of victorious trumpets, he had no doubt at all on which side the spiritual hopes of the world lay. He is never a mere patriot, of the 'my country right or wrong' type; he never blinds his eyes to England's faults, about which his Sonnets use harder words than they ever use about her enemy: Rapine, avarice, expense, This is idolatry; and these we adore : Yet, in spite of all, It is not to be thought of that the flood That this most famous stream in bogs and sands Be lost for ever ; and, though Englishmen change swords for ledgers, his faith and love are stronger than his fears: when I think of thee, and what thou art, Verily, in the bottom of my heart, Of those unfilial fears I am ashamed. It is only because England, and only so far as England, is a bulwark for the cause of men' that he can put his whole self, mind, and heart, and soul, into the struggle. All through, the appeal of his Sonnets is a spiritual appeal, more than worthy of Milton whose Sonnets, read to him by his sister in May 1802, were his immediate inspiration. The thing that moved him was what moves the best men to-day-the great issue between a universal despotism, alien, lawless, the mere creature of force, and the liberties of the European nations, whether inherited from the past or to be won from the future. That made the Swiss question, which produced what is perhaps the finest of all the Sonnets, so decisive for him : Two Voices are there; one is of the Sea, One of the Mountains; each a mighty Voice : Thou fought'st against him, but hast vainly striven ; |