to regard wordsworth critically, impersonally, is for some of us a rather difficult matter. with the disintegration of the solid orthodoxies wordsworth became for many intelligent, liberal-minded families the bible of that sort of pantheism, that dim faith in the existence of a spiritual world, which filled, somewhat inadequately, the place of the older dogmas. brought up as children in the wordsworthian tradition, we were taught to believe that a sunday walk among the hills was somehow equivalent to church-going: the first lesson was to be read among the clouds, the second in the primroses; the birds and the running waters sang hymns, and the whole blue landscape preached a sermon “of moral evil and of good.” from this dim religious education we brought away a not very well-informed veneration for the name of wordsworth, a dutiful conviction about the spirituality of nature in general, and an extraordinary superstition 151about mountains in particular—a superstition that it took at least three seasons of alpine sports to dissipate entirely. consequently, on reaching man’s estate, when we actually came to read our wordsworth, we found it extremely difficult to appraise his greatness, so many veils of preconceived ideas had to be pushed aside, so many inveterate deflections of vision allowed for. however, it became possible at last to look at wordsworth as a detached phenomenon in the world of ideas and not as part of the family tradition of childhood.
like many philosophers, and especially philosophers of a mystical tinge of thought, wordsworth based his philosophy on his emotions. the conversion of emotions into intellectual terms is a process that has been repeated a thousand times in the history of the human mind. we feel a powerful emotion before a work of art, therefore it partakes of the divine, is a reconstruction of the idea of which the natural object is a poor reflection. love moves us deeply, therefore human love is a type of divine love. nature in her various aspects inspires us with fear, joy, contentment, despair, therefore nature is a soul that expresses anger, sympathy, love, and hatred. one could go on indefinitely multiplying examples of the way in 152which man objectifies the kingdoms of heaven and hell that are within him. the process is often a dangerous one. the mystic who feels within himself the stirrings of inenarrable emotions is not content with these emotions as they are in themselves. he feels it necessary to invent a whole cosmogony that will account for them. to him this philosophy will be true, in so far as it is an expression in intellectual terms of these emotions. but to those who do not know these emotions at first hand, it will be simply misleading. the mystical emotions have what may be termed a conduct value; they enable the man who feels them to live his life with a serenity and confidence unknown to other men. but the philosophical terms in which these emotions are expressed have not necessarily any truth value. this mystical philosophy will be valuable only in so far as it revives, in the minds of its students, those conduct-affecting emotions which originally gave it birth. accepted at its intellectual face value, such a philosophy may not only have no worth; it may be actually harmful.
into this beautifully printed volume mr. cobden-sanderson has gathered together most of the passages in wordsworth’s poetry which possess the power of reviving the emotions 153that inspired them. it is astonishing to find that they fill the best part of two hundred and fifty pages, and that there are still plenty of poems—“peter bell,” for example—that one would like to see included. “the prelude” and “excursion” yield a rich tribute of what our ancestors would have called “beauties.” there is that astonishing passage in which the poet describes how, as a boy, he rowed by moonlight across the lake:
and, as i rose upon the stroke, my boat
went heaving through the water like a swan;
when, from behind that craggy steep till then
the horizon’s bound, a huge peak, black and huge,
as if with voluntary power instinct,
upreared its head. i struck and struck again,
and growing still in stature the grim shape
towered up between me and the stars, and still,
for so it seemed, with purpose of its own
and measured motion, like a living thing,
strode after me.
there is the history of that other fearful moment when
i heard among the solitary hills
low breathings coming after me, and sounds
of undistinguishable motion, steps
almost as silent as the turf they trod.
and there are other passages telling of nature in less awful and menacing aspects, nature 154the giver of comfort and strong serenity. reading these we are able in some measure to live for ourselves the emotions that were wordsworth’s. if we can feel his “shadowy exaltations,” we have got all that wordsworth can give us. there is no need to read the theology of his mysticism, the pantheistic explanation of his emotions. to peter bell a primrose by a river’s brim was only a yellow primrose. its beauty stirred in him no feeling. but one can be moved by the sight of the primrose without necessarily thinking, in the words of mr. cobden-sanderson’s preface, of “the infinite tenderness of the infinitely great, of the infinitely great which, from out the infinite and amid its own stupendous tasks, stoops to strew the path of man, the infinitely little, with sunshine and with flowers.” this is the theology of our primrose emotion. but it is the emotion itself which is important, not the theology. the emotion has its own powerful conduct value, whereas the philosophy derived from it, suspiciously anthropocentric, possesses, we should imagine, only the smallest value as truth.
