WORDSWORTH We approach our own times; and if, hitherto, literature has seemed to us a somewhat far-off thing, a thing of the Greek Myth, of chivalric allegory, of the Renaissance hero, it should now grow near and fast to us as our chief present aid in leading that large race-life of the mind whose end, as I have said, is to free the individual soul. The notion that poetry is a thing remote from life is a singular delusion; it is more truly to be described as the highway of our days, though we tread it, as children tread the path of innocence, without knowing it. Nothing is more constant in the life of boy or man than the outgoing of his soul into the world about him, and this outgoing, however it be achieved, is the act of poetry. It is in the realm of nature that these journeys first take place; nature is a medium by which the soul passes out into a larger existence; and as nature is very close to all men, perhaps our experience with her offers the most universal, certainly it offers the most elementary, illustration of the poetical life which all men, in some measure lead. Wordsworth is, pre-eminently, a guide in this region; and, as he was less indebted than poets usually are to the great tradition of literature in past ages, poetry in him seems more exclusively a thing of the present life, contemporary and altogether our own. Such a poet, endeavouring by a conscious reform to renew poetry in his age and bring it home to man's bosom, eliminating the conventional ways, images, and language even of the poetic past, is necessarily thrown back on nature, in the external world, and on character, in the internal world, for his subject-matter; history, except in contemporary forms, will be far from him, and of myth and chivalry, of Plato and the Italians, though he will have his share, he will have the least possible. This may leave his verse bare and monotonous in quality, but what substance it does contain will have great vitality, for it comes directly from the man. You will observe, however, that his narrower scope of learning, treatment, and theme makes no difference in the essential point of interest. His longest and most deliberate poem that one into which he tried to empty his entire mind, as I said the other night — “The Prelude," is the history of the formation of his mind, he says; that is, plainly, his subject is the same as Spenser's - how in our days is a human soul brought to its fullness of power and grace? The manner, the story, the accessories, the entire colour and atmosphere, are changed from what they were in the Elizabethan times, but the question abides. Spenser is hardly aware that nature has anything to do with forming the soul; to Wordsworth, nature seems its chief nourishment and fosterer, almost its creator. I desire to illustrate how Wordsworth represented the outgoing of the soul in nature, as a part of its discipline, its education in life, like the quest of the Knights in Spenser. When you go out to walk alone in a scene of natural beauty, your senses are first excited and interested; but often there arise in consequence feelings and ideas harmonious with the scene, and emotionally touched with it, which gradually absorb your consciousness; and at last you find yourself engaged in a mood — perhaps of memory from which the external scene has entirely dropped away or round which it is felt only as a nimbus or halo of beauty, or mystery or calm. This happens constantly and normally to all of us, and it is an act of poetry; for it is the very method and secret of the lyric. The poet receiving some impulse through his senses delights in it, and rises by natural harmony to feelings and ideas that belong with such joy, and ends in the higher pleasure to which his senses have served him as the stairway of divine surprise. Such a poem is Burns's |