XV RECOLLECTIONS OF WORDSWORTH It was about eight years before his death that I made acquaintance with Wordsworth. During the next four years I saw a great deal of him, chiefly among his own mountains; and, besides many delightful walks with him, I had the great honour of passing some days under his roof. The strongest of my impressions respecting him was that made by the manly simplicity and lofty rectitude which characterised him. In one of his later sonnets he writes of himself thus: "As a true man who long had served the lyre;" it was because he was a true man that he was a true poet; and it was impossible to know him without being reminded of this. In any case he must have been recognised as a man of original and energetic genius; but it was his strong and truthful moral nature, his intellectual sincerity, the abiding conscientiousness of his imagination, so to speak, which enabled that genius to do its great work, and bequeath to the England of the future the most solid mass of deep-hearted and authentic poetry which has been bestowed on her by any poet since the Elizabethan age. There was in his nature a veracity which, had it not been combined with an idealising imagination not less remarkable, would to many have appeared prosaic; yet, had he not possessed that characteristic, the products of his imagination would have lacked reality. They might still have enunciated a deep and sound philosophy; but they would have been divested of that human interest which belongs to them in a yet higher degree. All the little incidents of the neighbourhood were to him important. The veracity and the ideality which are so signally combined in Wordsworth's poetic descriptions of Nature made themselves at least as much felt whenever Nature was the theme of his discourse. In his intense reverence for Nature he regarded all poetical delineations of her with an exacting severity; and if those descriptions were not true, and true in a twofold sense, the more skilfully executed they were the more was his indignation roused by what he deemed a pretence and a deceit. An untrue description of Nature was to him a profaneness, a heavenly message sophisticated and falsely delivered. He expatiated much to me one day, as we walked among the hills above Grasmere, on the mode in which Nature had been described by one of the most justly popular of England's modern poets-one for whom he preserved a high and affectionate respect. "He took pains," Wordsworth said; "he went out with his pencil and notebook, and jotted down whatever struck him most—a river rippling over the sands, a ruined tower on a rock above it, a promontory, and a mountain-ash waving its red berries. He went home, and wove the whole together into a poetical description." After a pause Wordsworth resumed with a flashing eye and impassioned voice: "But Nature does not permit an inventory to be made of her charms! He should have left his pencil and notebook at home; fixed his eye, as he walked, with a reverent attention on all that surrounded him, and taken all into a heart that could understand and enjoy. Then, after several days had passed by, he should have interrogated his memory as to the scene. He would have discovered that while much of what he had admired was preserved to him, much was also most wisely obliterated. That which remained-the picture surviving in his mind-would have presented the ideal and essential truth of the scene, and done so, in a large part, by discarding much which, though in itself striking, was not characteristic. In every scene many of the most brilliant details are but accidental. A true eye for Nature does not note them, or at least does not dwell on them." On the same occasion he remarked: "Scott misquoted in one of his novels my lines on Yarrow. He makes me write "The swans on sweet St. Mary's lake but I wrote "The swan on still St. Mary's lake. Never could I have written 'swans' in the plural. The scene when I saw it, with its still and dim lake, under the dusky hills, was one of utter loneliness; there was one swan, and one only, stemming the water, and the pathetic loneliness of the region gave importance to the one companion of that swan-its own white image in the water. It was for that reason that I recorded the swan and the shadow. Had there been many swans and many shadows, they would have implied nothing as regards the character of the place, and I should have said nothing about them." He proceeded to remark that many who could descant with eloquence on Nature cared little for her, and that many more who truly loved her had yet no eye to discern her which he regarded as a sort of "spiritual discernment." He continued: "Indeed, I have hardly ever known any one but myself who had a true eye for Nature one that thoroughly understood her meanings and her teachings-except" (here he interrupted himself) one person. There was a young clergyman called Frederick Faber,1 who resided at Ambleside. He had not only as good an eye for Nature as I have, but even a better one; and he sometimes pointed out to me on the mountains effects which, with all my great experience, I had never detected." Truth, he used to say-that is, truth in its largest sense, as a thing at once real and ideal, a truth including exact and accurate detail, and yet everywhere 1 Afterwards Father Faber of the Oratory. His "Sir Launcelot" abounds in admirable descriptions of Nature. subordinating mere detail to the spirit of the whole,— this, he affirmed, was the soul and essence not only of descriptive poetry, but of all poetry. He had often, he told me, intended to write an essay on poetry, setting forth this principle, and illustrating it by references to the chief representatives of poetry in its various departments. It was this twofold truth which made Shakespeare the greatest of all poets. "It was well for Shakespeare," he remarked, "that he gave himself to the drama. It was that which forced him to be sufficiently human. His poems would otherwise, from the extraordinarily metaphysical character of his genius, have been too recondite to be understood. His youthful poems, in spite of their unfortunate and unworthy subjects, and his sonnets also, reveal this tendency. Nothing can surpass the greatness of Shakespeare where he is at his greatest; but it is wrong to speak of him as if even he were perfect. He had serious defects, and not those only proceeding from carelessness. For instance, in his delineations of character he does not assign as large a place to religious sentiment as enters into the constitution of human nature under normal circumstances. If his dramas had more religion in them, they would be truer representations of man, as well as more elevated and of a more searching interest." Wordsworth used to warn young poets against writing poetry remote from human interest. Dante he admitted to be an exception; but he considered that Shelley, and almost all others who had endeavoured to outsoar the human |