Читать книгу Oxford Lectures on Poetry - Andrew Bradley - Страница 6

‘Never forget what, I believe, was observed to you by Coleridge, that every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great or original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished; he must teach the art by which he is to be seen… My ears are stone-dead to this idle buzz, and my flesh as insensible as iron to these petty stings.’ These sentences, from a letter written by Wordsworth to Lady Beaumont in 1807, may remind us of the common attitude of his reviewers in the dozen years when most of his best poetry was produced. A century has gone by, and there is now no English poet, either of that period or of any other, who has been the subject of criticism more just, more appreciative, we may even say more reverential. Some of this later criticism might have satisfied even that sense of wonder, awe, and solemn responsibility with which the poet himself regarded the operation of the spirit of poetry within him; and if we desire an interpretation of that spirit, we shall find a really astonishing number of excellent guides. Coleridge, Hazlitt, Arnold, Swinburne, Brooke, Myers, Pater, Lowell, Legouis, – how easy to add to this list of them! Only the other day there came another, Mr. Walter Raleigh. And that the best book on an English poet that has appeared for some years should be a study of Wordsworth is just what might have been expected. The whirligig of time has brought him a full revenge.

I have no idea of attempting in these two lectures another study, or even an estimate, of Wordsworth. My purpose is much more limited. I think that in a good deal of current criticism, and also in the notions of his poetry prevalent among general readers, a disproportionate emphasis is often laid on certain aspects of his mind and writings. And I should like to offer some words of warning as to this tendency, and also some advice as to the spirit in which he should be approached. I will begin with the advice, though I am tempted at the last moment to omit it, and simply to refer you to Mr. Raleigh, who throughout his book has practised what I am about to preach.

1

There have been greater poets than Wordsworth, but none more original. He saw new things, or he saw things in a new way. Naturally, this would have availed us little if his new things had been private fancies, or if his new perception had been superficial. But that was not so. If it had been, Wordsworth might have won acceptance more quickly, but he would not have gained his lasting hold on poetic minds. As it is, those in whom he creates the taste by which he is relished, those who learn to love him (and in each generation they are not a few), never let him go. Their love for him is of the kind that he himself celebrated, a settled passion, perhaps ‘slow to begin,’ but ‘never ending,’ and twined around the roots of their being. And the reason is that they find his way of seeing the world, his poetic experience, what Arnold meant by his ‘criticism of life,’ to be something deep, and therefore something that will hold. It continues to bring them joy, peace, strength, exaltation. It does not thin out or break beneath them as they grow older and wiser; nor does it fail them, much less repel them, in sadness or even in their sorest need. And yet – to return to our starting-point – it continues to strike them as original, and something more. It is not like Shakespeare’s myriad-mindedness; it is, for good or evil or both, peculiar. They can remember, perhaps, the day when first they saw a cloud somewhat as Wordsworth saw it, or first really understood what made him write this poem or that; his unique way of seeing and feeling, though now familiar and beloved, still brings them not only peace, strength, exaltation, but a ‘shock of mild surprise’; and his paradoxes, long known by heart and found full of truth, still remain paradoxes.

If this is so, the road into Wordsworth’s mind must be through his strangeness and his paradoxes, and not round them. I do not mean that they are everywhere in his poetry. Much of it, not to speak of occasional platitudes, is beautiful without being peculiar or difficult; and some of this may be as valuable as that which is audacious or strange. But unless we get hold of that, we remain outside Wordsworth’s centre; and, if we have not a most unusual affinity to him, we cannot get hold of that unless we realise its strangeness, and refuse to blunt the sharpness of its edge. Consider, for example, two or three of his statements; the statements of a poet, no doubt, and not of a philosopher, but still evidently statements expressing, intimating, or symbolising, what for him was the most vital truth. He said that the meanest flower that blows could give him thoughts that often lie too deep for tears. He said, in a poem not less solemn, that Nature was the soul of all his moral being; and also that she can so influence us that nothing will be able to disturb our faith that all that we behold is full of blessings. After making his Wanderer tell the heart-rending tale of Margaret, he makes him say that the beauty and tranquillity of her ruined cottage had once so affected him

He said that this same Wanderer could read in the silent faces of the clouds unutterable love, and that among the mountains all things for him breathed immortality. He said to ‘Almighty God,’

This last, it will be agreed, is a startling statement; but is it a whit more extraordinary than the others? It is so only if we assume that we are familiar with thoughts that lie too deep for tears, or if we translate ‘the soul of all my moral being’ into ‘somehow concordant with my moral feelings,’ or convert ‘all that we behold’ into ‘a good deal that we behold,’ or transform the Wanderer’s reading of the silent faces of the clouds into an argument from ‘design.’ But this is the road round Wordsworth’s mind, not into it.39

Again, with all Wordsworth’s best poems, it is essential not to miss the unique tone of his experience. This doubtless holds good of any true poet, but not in the same way. With many poems there is little risk of our failing either to feel what is distinctive of the writer, or to appropriate what he says. What is characteristic, for example, in Byron’s lines, On this day I complete my thirty-sixth year, or in Shelley’s Stanzas written in dejection near Naples, cannot escape discovery, nor is there any difficulty in understanding the mood expressed. But with Wordsworth, for most readers, this risk is constantly present in some degree. Take, for instance, one of the most popular of his lyrics, the poem about the daffodils by the lake. It is popular partly because it remains a pretty thing even to those who convert it into something quite undistinctive of Wordsworth. And it is comparatively easy, too, to perceive and to reproduce in imagination a good deal that is distinctive; for instance, the feeling of the sympathy of the waves and the flowers and the breeze in their glee, and the Wordsworthian ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’ expressed in the lines (written by his wife),

But there remains something still more intimately Wordsworthian:

It is thrust into the reader’s face, for these are the opening lines. But with many readers it passes unheeded, because it is strange and outside their own experience. And yet it is absolutely essential to the effect of the poem.

This poem, however, even when thoroughly conventionalised, would remain, as I said, a pretty thing; and it could scarcely excite derision. Our point is best illustrated from the pieces by which Wordsworth most earned ridicule, the ballad poems. They arose almost always from some incident which, for him, had a novel and arresting character and came on his mind with a certain shock; and if we do not get back to this through the poem, we remain outside it. We may, of course, get back to this and yet consider the poem to be more or less a failure. There is here therefore room for legitimate differences of opinion. Mr. Swinburne sees, no doubt, as clearly as Coleridge did, the intention of The Idiot Boy and The Thorn, yet he calls them ‘doleful examples of eccentricity in dullness,’ while Coleridge’s judgment, though he criticised both poems, was very different. I believe (if I may venture into the company of such critics) that I see why Wordsworth wrote Goody Blake and Harry Gill and the Anecdote for Fathers, and yet I doubt if he has succeeded in either; but a great man, Charles James Fox, selected the former for special praise, and Matthew Arnold included the latter in a selection from which he excluded The Sailor’s Mother.40 Indeed, of all the poems at first most ridiculed there is probably not one that has not been praised by some excellent judge. But they were ridiculed by men who judged them without attempting first to get inside them. And this is fatal.

I may bring out the point by referring more fully to one of them. Alice Fell was beloved by the best critic of the nineteenth century, Charles Lamb; but the general distaste for it was such that it was excluded ‘in policy’ from edition after edition of Wordsworth’s Poems; many still who admire Lucy Gray see nothing to admire in Alice Fell; and you may still hear the question asked, What could be made of a child crying for the loss of her cloak? And what, I answer, could be made of a man poking his stick into a pond to find leeches? What sense is there in asking questions about the subject of a poem, if you first deprive this subject of all the individuality it possesses in the poem? Let me illustrate this individuality methodically. A child crying for the loss of her cloak is one thing, quite another is a child who has an imagination, and who sees the tattered remnants of her cloak whirling in the wheel-spokes of a post-chaise fiercely driven by strangers on lonesome roads through a night of storm in which the moon is drowned. She was alone, and, having to reach the town she belonged to, she got up behind the chaise, and her cloak was caught in the wheel. And she is fatherless and motherless, and her poverty (the poem is called Alice Fell, or Poverty) is so extreme that for the loss of her weather-beaten rag she does not ‘cry’; she weeps loud and bitterly; weeps as if her innocent heart would break; sits by the stranger who has placed her by his side and is trying to console her, insensible to all relief; sends forth sob after sob as if her grief could never, never have an end; checks herself for a moment to answer a question, and then weeps on as if she had lost her only friend, and the thought would choke her very heart. It was this