WORDSWORTH AS TEACHER.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19952, 20 November 1926, Page 14

WORDSWORTH AS TEACHER.

APOSTLE OE SIMPLICITY

CALL TO HIS COUNTRYMEN. It is a profound advantage to have an author tell us what he aimed at. Wordsworth did this, and his critics should begin by making themselves familiar with his programme. He wrote “to console the afflicted; to add sunshine to daylight bv making the happy happier; to teach the young and the gracious of e.’cry age to see, to think and feel, and therefore to become more actively and securely virtuous —this is the office of my poems, which.l trust they will faithfully perform, long after we (that is. all that is mortal of us) are mouldered in our graves.” "Every great poet is a teacher; I wish either to be considered as a teacher, or nothing.” We are happily upon our honour to take Wordsworth on his own terms, and to remember that ha did not propose to teach all and sundry and become the general monitor of mankind. He limited his pupils to two classes, the young and the gracious. If one is not young or not gracious, Wordsworth has nothing to say to such a person. Here, then, at the very outset of our questionings about the poet we are pulled up with a. jerk, and set upon the task selfexamination, The test of youth is simple except in so far as one may raise the point whether poetic license may not be allowed in determining the age at which one is no longer young. We may assume that Words worth would agree to a liberal interpretation

But the matter may be quite otherwise when we ask what he means by a gracious parson. The poet in reply says with considerable emphasis that there neither is nor can be any enjoyment of poetry among 19 out of 90 of those persons who live, or :s!i t ■ live ,in the broad light of the world —among those who either are, or are striving to make themselves, people of consideration in society. ‘This is a truth and an awful one; because to be incapable of a feeling f iKetiy, in my sense of the word, is to be without love of human nature and reverence for God.” The things Wordsworth dealt with had nothing to do, he said, with routs, dinners, morning calls, hurry from door to door, from street to street, on foot or in carriage ‘What have they to do (to say all at once) with a lifs without love? In such a life there can be no thought; for we have no thoughts (save thoughts of pain)j but as far as we have love and admiration. What is all this but a summons to the penitent form as the first step to appreciating Wordsworth? It is startling. • May not a fashionable worldling , becoms a brilliant chemist or mathematician > And may he not with equal ease master the thoughts, feeliDga and images of Wordsworth’s poetry and pronnounce judgment upon it? No, says the poet. n. man whose life is given up to chis, fame oi pleasure is simply incapable of understanding the highest poetry. Dealing as it dops with moral ideas, it can he appreciated only by moral beinge otl |y, c i• • • spiritual , things are

spiritually discerned." Quite deliberately Wordsworth accepted all the risks Involved In such a lSfty standard, and refused to write down to the level of superficial observers and unthinking minds. He heartily approved of Coleridge a saying that every great and original writer, in proportion ias he is great or original, must create the taste by which he is to be relished, he must teach the art by which he Is to be seen; "this ill a certain degree. even to all persons, however wise or puerile their lives, and however unvitiated their taste." Straight is the gate and narrow is ThTsTndependence and confidence explains Wordsworth's early politics as weil as his poetry. At Cambridge he chafed under the conventionalism of university life, and in t rance he enthusiastically supported the Republic. He came to see That nations are not redeemed by bloody revolutions, and he modified in later life, his over-insistence unon the feeling and language of the im* sm hlsticated man, but he never surrandc’xd the principle that, In order to inproc.ate true poetry, reverence and love of truth must give the needed discipline and preparation Obloquy and hostility were arrayed against his earlier productions, but he held on his way, and was duly honoured both by his university and his country. Up among his mountains he did battle against the evils of his age. Recluse he was. reading but little, so little that Matthew Arnold says he despised books and did not know enough. For 60 years he wandered much; meditated much and wrote almost without ceasing. One has a half-malicious pleasure in finding that he was often arrogant and rude, was not entirely a constantly amiable person, and would cut books with a buttery knife. . He felt that he had a commission, and tried to school his own heart to look justly and calmly on the turmoil of humanity. Like a prophet of old, he thundered against the Idolatry of wealth, Insisting on the sanctity of each separate soul, and called back his countrymen to simpler mannera and to simpler laws. His apostrophe to Milton contains language which might with truth be applied to himself —

Thy aoul was like a star, and dwelt apart, Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea, . .. ' Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free. Through ■ long years of scorn he persevered In hts calm way, feeling within himself that men would yet listen to him., “Make yourselves at rest respecting me. he said. i sneak' the truths the world must feel at list ” Between 1807 and 1815 there was not one edition of his works called for. Jeffrey lashed him. Byron sneered at him, but one remembers Southey s remark. “Byron crush The Excursion! He might as well attempt to crush Mount Skid daw The Excursion works out Wordsworth s Ideal of a humanised society. The various characters add their parts to the argument which leads up to the faith at the heart of Wordsworth s poetry, the truth that the perfect state is not to be secured by violent change, but by a gracious revolution in the minds of citizens. Towards this desirable end every child is to be While, therefore. Wordsworth is the poet of Nature, we must use that term as including man, and especially all who suffer. He dealt with life, and touched no slde of t without sympathy and truth. , •^■ n . y . * n ‘r, * gent reader will find Wordsworth giving him back his own thoughts enriched with new glory. He stands close to Shakespeare and t 0 It*must be conceded that Wordsworth was without humour, that he did not criticise himself sufficiently, and consequently that he wrote much that was hopelessly dull. Nevertheless, he was the poet that made many other poets, and his finest works are among the glories of English poetry. Felicity of phrase, power of describing natural objects, and mysticism, half pantheistic and half Christian, are the mam attractions of his noetrv His Ode on Immortality towers above all the rest, with Tlntern Abbey not much less majestic. The sonnet form suited the bent of his mind, and readers will never cease to revert to them with glowing appreciation. , .. When Wordsworth appeared upon the scene the two great tendencies were the accumula* tion of wealth and the division of labour The dangers are now obvious. We get a more complete society, and a less complete individual. Wordsworth saw the position, and by his poetry called his countrymen back to simplicity and reality, and proclaimed that a man’s life conslsteth not in the abundance of the things he possessed!.