‘THREE kinds of men’, said Eckhart in Sermons and Collations, ‘see God. The first see Him in faith; they know no more of Him than they can make out through a partition. The second behold God in the light of grace but only as the answer to their longings, as giving them sweetness, devotion, inwardness, and other such-like things which are issuing from His gift. The third kind see Him in the divine light.’
Of these three kinds of men, George Herbert belongs to the second category, Smart and the yet more irradiated Blake to the third. Wordsworth belongs to neither kind, for although to Blake ‘even Wordsworth seemed a kind of atheist, who mistook the changing signs of vegetable nature for the unchanging realities of imagination’ (Arthur Symons), he was wrong. Wordsworth did not see God through a partition — even one which is of living matter and not made by the hands of men from bricks and dead sticks: to him, ‘the lights of faith and of nature are subordinate John Baptists’. He was, indeed, more of the nature of the disciples than, like Shelley, an order of being like the archangels.
The difference between Wordsworth, and Blake, Smart, and their brother in prose, Traherne, is the difference in nature between certain men of God — (difference, not separation).
‘It is written.’ said St. Bernard,1 ‘the angel who spoke in me.
‘And yet there is a difference even here. The angel is in us suggesting what is good, not bestowing it: stimulating us to goodness, not creating goodness. God is so in us as to give the grace, and infuse it into us; or rather, so in us that He Himself is infused and partaken of, so that one need not fear to say that He is one with our substance. For you know “He that is joined unto God is one spirit”. The Angel, therefore, is with the soul; God is in the soul. The Angel is in the soul as a comrade, God as life.’
‘I am a companion of angels’, wrote Blake to his friend Hayley. But these were the companions of his earthly side. He had deeper, more terrible communions than these.
It is the comrade, the angel, that Wordsworth knew on the levels of his life. Though there were days, those moments which contain eternity, when he saw the Burning Bush.
On the levels of his life, he knew light, but it was the light of Reason rather than the innermost secret Flame. He brought to his poetry all the ‘household stuffe of Heaven on earth’. And it is a poetry more of the reason than the intellect … a reason which is Life. It is that reason of which St. Augustine spoke when he said, ‘The earth was made; but, the earth itself which was made is not life. In the Wisdom of God, however, there is spiritually a certain Reason after which the earth was made. This is life.’
Reason and Tranquillity were the companion Angels of Wordsworth, as he walked through an everyday world made splendid by the light of a genius which illuminated but did not transform. Common speech and common experience were here, but all made radiant and unforgettable by inspiration. There were days — the Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood was such an undying day — when the Pentecostal Flames came, for a moment, to our common speech. The ordinary objects of life became supernatural. The common celandine was still the common celandine, but it was also a star. For Wordsworth had the warmth of the earth and of the human heart, and that genius which was rather of the heart than of the soul had taken all the chill from Reason, till Reason had the pulse of a human, yet a holy, heart.
For his poems are ineffably holy:
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light.
In the note to that ode which was the mountain on which he and his angels spoke with God (the Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood), he says, speaking of his early years: ‘I was often unable to think of external things as having external existence, and I communed with all that I saw as something not apart from, but inherent in, my own immaterial nature. Many times while going to school have I grasped at a wall or tree to recall myself from this abyss of idealism to the reality.’
The kernel of all his poems — even when we have to cut to that kernel through an unnecessary husk furred with earth, have a singular purity and fidelity. Matthew Arnold said of him,’ It might seem that Nature not only gave him the matter for his poem, but wrote his poem for him’. That fine critic Arthur Symons, quoting this, adds, ‘He has none of the poet’s pride in his own invention, only a confidence in the voices that he has heard speaking when others were aware of nothing but silence. Thus it is that in the interpretation of natural things he can be absolutely pellucid, like pure light, which reveals to us every object in its own colours.’
Indeed, the sublimity of his simplicity is such that it is not so much an interpretation as ‘an Idea of the World’, as Wagner said of music, in his work on Beethoven, ‘wherein the world immediately exhibits its essential nature’.
The light he knew was that which illuminates our common earth, but whose source, whose beginning, is beyond our knowledge, — the ‘celestial light’.
‘The Peace of the celestial city is the perfectly ordered and harmonious enjoyment of God and of one another in God. The peace of all things is the tranquillity of order.’— SAINT AUGUSTINE, The City of God.
To this peace, Wordsworth attained.—E. S.
Wordsworth, at his highest, has the tranquillity, the activity of the saints: the ‘tranquillity according to His essence, activity according to His Nature: perfect stillness, perfect fecundity’ of which Rusbroeck wrote in De Vera Contemplatione.
‘The nobler things are, the commoner they are. Love is noble, because it is universal.’—TAULER, Sermons.
‘God is so omnipresent, as that the Ubiquitary will needs have the body of God everywhere; so omnipresent, as that the Stancarest will needs have God not only to be in everything, but to be everything — that God is an angel in an angel, and a stone in a stone, and a straw in a straw.’ —John Donne, Sermon VII.
‘Can you take too much joy in your Father’s works? He is Himself in everything. Some things are little on the outside, and rough and common, but I remember the time when the dust of the streets were as pleasing as gold to my infant eyes, and now they are more precious to the eye of reason.’—THOMAS TRAHERNE, Centuries of Meditation.
‘Suppose a river, or a drop of water, an apple, or a sand, an ear of corn, or an herb: God knoweth infinite excellencies in it more than we: He seeth how it relateth to angels and men; how it proceedeth from the most perfect Lover to the most perfect Beloved; how it conduceth in its place, by the best of means to the best of ends: and for this cause it cannot be beloved too much. God the author and God the end are to be beloved in it; angels and men are to be beloved in it; and it is highly to be esteemed for their sakes. O what a treasure is every sand when truly understood! Who can love anything that God made too much. What a world would that be, were everything loved as it ought to be.’—TRAHERNE, Centuries of Meditation.
Emerson said of Goethe: ‘There is a certain heat in the breast, which attends the perception of a primary truth, which is the shining of the spiritual sun down into the shaft of the mine’.
This was the common experience, also, of Wordsworth. —E. S.
‘He … has a certain gravitation towards truth.’—Ibid.
‘The peculiar note of Wordsworth’s genius at its very highest, is that of sublimity in tenderness.’—SWINBURNE, Essays and Studies.
‘The Beatific Vision has come to him in tangible embodied form, through a kind of religion of the eye, which seems to attain its final rapture, unlike most forms of mysticism, with open eyes.’—ARTHUR SYMONS, The Romantic Movement in English Poetry.
‘… It seems to me undeniable that Wordsworth, who could endow such daily matters, such modest emotion and experience, with a force of contagious and irresistible sympathy which makes their interest universal and eternal, showed no such certitude of hand when dealing with the proper and natural elements of tragedy.’—SWINBURNE, writing on Wordsworth’s ‘Tribute to the Memory of a Dog’.
‘We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us, and if we do not agree, seems to put its hand into its breeches pocket…. Old Matthew spoke to him some years ago on some nothing, and because he happens in an evening walk to imagine the figure of the old man, he must stamp it down in black and white, and it is henceforth sacred. I don’t mean to deny Wordsworth’s grandeur … but I mean to say we need not be teased with grandeur and merit when we can have them uncontaminated and unobtrusive.’—KEATS, Letter to Reynolds, 3 Feb. 1818.
NOTE.—Lord Houghton, in his Life of Keats, remarks: ‘Keats was perhaps unconsciously swayed in his estimate of Wordsworth at this moment by an incident which had happened at Mr. Haydon’s. The young poet had been induced to repeat to the elder the Hymn to Pan, out of ‘Endymion’ … Wordsworth only said, “It was a pretty piece of Paganism.”’
NOTE.—A monstrous remark. In any case, Keats’ criticism had justice in it, and Wordsworth’s had none. —E. S.
‘… Part of [his] singular power over certain minds was doubtless owing to the might of will, the solid individual weight of mind, which moulded his work into the form he chose for it; part to the strong assumption and high self-reliance which grew in him so close to the self-confidence and presumption; part to the sublimity and supremacy of his genius in its own climate and proper atmosphere — one which forbids access to all others and escape to him, since only there can he breathe and range, and he alone can breathe and range there; part to the frequent vapour that wraps his head and the frequent dust that soils his feet, filling the softer sort with admiration of one so lofty and so familiar; and part, I fear, to the quality which no great poet shared or can share with him, his inveterate and invincible Philistinism, his full community of spirit, and faith, in certain things of import, with the vulgarest English mind — or that which, with the Philistine, does duty for a mind. To those who, like Shelley and Landor, could mark this indomitable chillness and thickness of sense which makes him mix with magnificent and flawless verse, the “enormous folly “of those stupid staves, his pupils could always point out again the peculiar and unsurpassable grandeur of his higher mood; it was vain to reply that these could be seen and enjoyed without condonation or excuse of his violent and wearisome peculiarities. This is what makes his poetry such unwholesome and immoral reading for Philistines; they can turn upon their rebukers and say, “Here is one of us who by your own admission is also one of the great poets”.’—SWINBURNE, Essays and Studies.
‘What Wordsworth’s poetic life lacked was energy, and he refused to recognise that no amount of energy will suffice for a continual production…. When one has said that he wrote instinctively, without which there could be no poetry, one must add that he wrote always. Continual writing is really a bad form of dissipation; it drains away the very marrow of the brain.’—ARTHUR SYMONS, The Romantic Movement in English Poetry.
Of Wordsworth it might be said, ‘God places a watery cloud in the eye, that when the light of heaven shines upon it, it may produce a rain-bow to be a sacrament’.—JEREMY TAYLOR, in a Sermon.
To Shelley might be applied the words of St. Ignatius: ‘My Eros is crucified’.