Читать книгу Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 4. Naturalism in England - Георг Брандес - Страница 10

Wordworth’s real point of departure, then, was the conviction that in town life and its distractions men had forgotten nature, and that they had been punished for it; constant social intercourse had dissipated their energy and talents and impaired the susceptibility of their hearts to simple and pure impressions. Amongst his hundreds of sonnets there is one which is peculiarly eloquent of this fundamental idea. It is the well-known:—

"The World is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,

The winds that will be howling at all hours

And are up-gather'd now like sleeping flowers,

For this, for everything we are out of tune;

It moves us not.—Great God! I'd rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn,—

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn."

These are remarkable words to have come from Wordsworth's pen—remarkable, because they show what all sincere naturalism really is, let it be decked with as many theistic trappings as it will. In its inmost essence it is akin to the old Greek conception of nature, and antagonistic to all the official creeds of modern days; it is vitally impregnated with the pantheism which reappears in this century as the dominating element in the feeling for nature in every literature. In a preceding volume of this work (The Romantic School in Germany) we made acquaintance with the pantheism which lay concealed under Tieck's Romantic view of nature. Now we come upon it in the form of the human being's self-forgetful and half unconscious amalgamation with nature, as a single tone in the great harmony of the universe. This idea has found expression in a curious little poem:—

"A slumber did my spirit seal;

I had no human fears:

She seem'd a thing that could not feel

The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;

She neither hears nor sees;

Roll'd round in earth's diurnal course

With rocks, and stones, and trees."

If we transport ourselves into the mood which gave birth to such a poem as this, we are conscious that it is the outcome of purely pantheistic ideas; unconscious life is regarded as the basis and source of conscious life, and every earthly being is conceived of as having lain in nature's womb, an inseparable part of her until the moment when consciousness began. One of the germs of the poetry of the new century lies in this little poem; for here, in place of the cultivated human being as developed and extolled by the eighteenth century, we have the human being as seen by the new era in the circle of his kin—birds and wild beasts, plants and stones. Christianity commanded men to love their fellow-men; pantheism bade them love the meanest animal. Hart-Leap Well, undoubtedly one of Wordsworth's finest poems, a simple little romance in two parts, is a movingly eloquent plea for a poor, ill-used animal, a hunted stag—that is to say, a creature in whom the classical poets would have been interested only in the shape of venison, and belonging to the species which the admirers of the age of chivalry, including Scott himself, would have allowed their heroes to kill by the hundred. Deeply affecting, in spite of the comparative insignificance of its subject, grandly simple in its style, the little poem is a noble evidence of the heartfelt piety towards nature which is Wordsworth's patent of nobility.

This piety in his case consists mainly in reverence for the childlike, and for the child. And this same reverence for the human being who in his unconsciousness is nearest to nature, is another of the characteristic features of the new century. In a little poem with which Wordsworth himself introduces all the rest, he writes:—

"My heart leaps up when I behold

A rainbow in the sky:

So was it when my life began,

So is it now I am a man,

So be it when I shall grow old,

Or let me die!

The Child is father of the Man:

And I could wish my days to be

Bound each to each by natural piety."

Here we have reverence for the child developed to such an extent that it supplants reverence for age. But this conferring of his natural poetic rights on the child is, as the history of every country shows us, only one of the many signs of the reaction against the eighteenth century's worship of the enlightened, social human being, and its banishment of the child to the nursery. Wordsworth carries the reaction inaugurated by the nineteenth century to its logical conclusion. In one of his sonnets he describes a walk which he takes on a beautiful evening with a little girl. After describing the tranquil evening mood—

"The holy time is quiet as a nun

Breathless with adoration;"

he turns to the child beside him, and says:

"Dear child! dear girl! that walkest with me here,

If thou appear untouched by solemn thought

Thy nature is not therefore less divine; Thou liest in Abraham's bosom all the year, And worship'st at the Temple's inner shrine, God being with thee when we know it not."

The pious ending is inevitable with Wordsworth; but, as any intelligent reader may see for himself, it is only tacked on to the main idea, that of the child's own divine nature. In his famous Ode on Intimations of Immortality Wordsworth develops this idea with a fervour of enthusiasm which carried him too great a length for even such a devotee of naïveté as Coleridge. A child of six he apostrophises thus:—

"Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie

Thy soul's immensity;

Thou best philosopher, who yet dost keep

Thy heritage; thou eye among the blind.

That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep,

Haunted for ever by the eternal Mind,—

Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!

On whom those truths do rest

Which we are toiling all our lives to find."

These assertions are, doubtless, explained away in a poetico-philosophical manner by the subsequent attribution of the child's greatness to the fact that it stands nearer than we do to the life before birth, and, consequently, to the "intimations of immortality"; but even this is not to be taken as Wordsworth's literal meaning, if we are to believe an assertion of Coleridge's which remained uncontradicted by the author. The child is revered as earth's "foster-child," and

"The Youth, who daily farther from the east

Must travel, still is Nature's priest."

In numerous poems Wordsworth refers to the strong impression made upon him as a youth by the pageantry of nature. In one of them, to which, according to his frequent custom, he gave a prolix title, Influence of Natural Objects in Calling Forth and Strengthening the Imagination in Boyhood and Early Youth, he thanks the Spirit of the Universe for having from the first dawn of his childhood intertwined for him

"The passions that build up our human soul;

Not with the mean and vulgar works of man,—

But with high objects, with enduring things,

With life and nature, purifying thus

The elements of feeling and of thought

. . . . . . . . . . . . . until we recognise

A grandeur in the beatings of the heart."

Observe the vivid, delicate perception of nature in the following description:—

"Nor was this fellowship vouchsafed to me

With stinted kindness. In November days,

When vapours rolling down the valleys made

A lonely scene more lonesome; among woods

At noon; and 'mid the calm of summer nights,

When, by the margin of the trembling lake,

Beneath the gloomy hills, I homeward went

In solitude, such intercourse was mine:

Mine was it in the fields both day and night,

And by the waters, all the summer long;

And in the frosty season, when the sun

Was set, and visible for many a mile,

The cottage windows through the twilight blazed,

I heeded not the summons:—happy time

It was indeed for all of us; for me

It was a time of rapture!—Clear and loud

The village clock tolled six—I wheeled about,

Proud and exulting like an untired horse

That cares not for his home.—All shod with steel

We hissed along the polished ice, in games

Confederate, imitative of the chase

And woodland pleasures,—the resounding horn,

The pack loud-chiming, and the hunted hare.

So through the darkness and the cold we flew,

And not a voice was idle: with the din

Smitten, the precipices rang aloud;

The leafless trees and every icy crag

Tinkled like iron; while the distant hills

Into the tumult sent an alien sound

Of melancholy, not unnoticed, while the stars,

Eastward, were sparkling clear, and in the west

The orange sky of evening died away.

Not seldom from the uproar I retired

Into a silent bay,—or sportively

Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng,

To cut across the reflex of a star,

Image, that, flying still before me, gleamed

Upon the glassy plain: and oftentimes,

When we had given our bodies to the wind,

And all the shadowy banks on either side

Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still

The rapid line of motion, then at once

Have I, reclining back upon my heels

Stopped short; yet still the solitary cliffs

Wheeled by me—even as if the earth had rolled

With visible motion her diurnal round!

Behind me did they stretch in solemn train,

Feebler and feebler, and I stood and watched

Till all was tranquil as a summer sea."

This is a picture of nature which it would be difficult to match in later English poetry.

In one of his most beautiful and profound poems, Lines Composed a few Miles above Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth has described his own feeling for nature in expressions which he declared that he recognised again in the most famous and most poetical passages of Byron's Childe Harold, and which, in any case, were indisputably epoch-making in English poetical art. He writes:—

"For nature then

(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,

And their glad animal movements all gone by)

To me was all in all.—I cannot paint

What then I was. The sounding cataract

Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,

The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,

Their colours and their forms, were then to me

An appetite: a feeling and a love,

That had no need of a remoter charm,

By thought supplied, nor any interest

Unborrowed from the eye."

Granted that it was very absurd of Wordsworth to talk (to Moore in 1820) of Byron's plagiarisms from him, and to declare that the whole Third Canto of Childe Harold was founded on his style and sentiments—and granted that Lord John Russell is right when he remarks drily in this connection that if Wordsworth wrote the Third Canto of Childe Harold, it is his best work—it is, nevertheless, easy to understand that Wordsworth could not but feel as if, in the chief passages in that canto, and the celebrated passages about solitude in the earlier cantos, what was naturally expressed by him had been worked by Byron into a laboured and antithetical sort of declamation.[1] It is not difficult to discern, in these outbursts, the wounded vanity of a narrow mind which felt itself eclipsed; but it cannot be denied that it really was Wordsworth who first struck the chord which Byron varied with such skill, nor that single striking and vivid lines of Wordsworth's had impressed themselves on Byron's memory. Who can read, for example, the following lines of Childe Harold (Canto iii. 72):—

"I live not in myself; but I become

Portion of that around me; and to me

High mountains are a feeling,"

without thinking of Wordsworth's verses just quoted? And who can deny that Byron, as it were, adopted Wordsworth's idea, and added thoughts of his own to it when he wrote (Childe Harold, iii. 75):—

"Are not the mountains, waves, and skies, a part

Of me and of my soul, as I of them?

Is not the love of these deep in my heart

With a pure passion? should I not contemn

All objects, if compared with these?"

Wordsworth, in Tintern Abbey, describes his passion for nature as something past, as something which only lasted for a moment during an age of transition, and very soon turned into reflection and questioning; but Byron's passion is a permanent feeling, the expression of his nature. In his case the Ego in its relations with nature is not forced into the strait-jacket of orthodox piety; no obstruction of dogma is set up between nature and him; in his mystical worship of it he feels himself one with it, and this without the help of any deus ex machine.

Passion is not the special characteristic of Wordsworth's attitude to nature. The distinguishing quality in his perception and reproduction of natural impressions is of a more delicate and complex kind. The impression, although it is received by healthy, vigorously perceptive senses, is modified and subdued by pondering over it. It does not directly attune the poet to song. If Wordsworth can say, with Goethe: "I sing like the bird that sits on the bough," it is, at any rate, not like the nightingale that he sings; his is not the love-song which streams forth, rich and full, telling of the intoxication of the soul and breaking and mocking at the silence of the night. He himself, after describing the song of the nightingale in similar terms to these, adds (Poems of Imagination, x.):—

"I heard a stock-dove sing or say

His homely tale this very day;

His voice was buried among trees,

Yet to be come at by the breeze;

He did not cease; but cooed—and cooed;

And somewhat pensively he wooed:

He sang of love with quiet blending,

Slow to begin, and never ending;

Of serious faith and inward glee;

That was the song—the song for me!"

It was himself that Wordsworth tried to paint in describing the pensive, serious wooer. According to the custom of so many poets, he attempted to formulate his methods into a theory and to prove that all good poetry must possess the qualities of his own. All good poetry is, he says, "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. But poems to which any value can be attached were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man who, being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply." This theory he supports by the argument that a "our continued influxes of feeling are directed and modified by our thoughts, which are indeed the representatives of all our past feelings"—a profound and striking, if not scientifically satisfactory utterance, as well as an excellent characterisation of his own poetic thought and deliberation.

His method consists, exactly defined, in storing up natural impressions, in order to dwell on and thoroughly assimilate them. Later they are brought forth from the soul's store-house and gazed on and enjoyed again. To understand this peculiarity of Wordsworth's is to have the key to his originality. In Tintern Abbey he tells how the direct, passionate joy in the beauties of nature which he felt in his youth turned, in his riper years, into this quiet assimilation of the human-like moods of nature:—

"That time is past,

And all its aching joys are now no more,

And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this

Faint I, nor mourn, nor murmur; other gifts

Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,

Abundant recompense. For I have learned

To look on nature, not as in the hour

Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes

The still, sad music of humanity.

Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power

To chasten and subdue. And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean, and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things."

In this passage Wordsworth has delimited his territory, has poetically yet plainly indicated his special province. What a contrast to Byron, who seldom or never heard the human voice in nature, and certainly never except in harsh and grating tones—the man who in Childe Harold actually calls human life "a false nature—not in the harmony of things!"

But we have not yet come to the most remarkable lines in Tintern Abbey, namely those in which Wordsworth describes the silent influence on the mind of the hoarded, carefully preserved impressions of nature. He writes:—

"These beauteous forms,

Through a long absence, have not been to me

As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:

But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din

Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,

In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,

Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart,

And passing even into my purer mind,

With tranquil restoration:—feelings, too,

Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,

As have no slight or trivial influence

On that best portion of a good man's life,

His little, nameless, unremembered acts

Of kindness and of love."

And he asserts that he is indebted to the influence of nature for yet another gift,

"Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood

In which the burthen of the mystery,

In which the heavy and the weary weight

Of all this unintelligible world

Is lightened";

and his train of thought reaches its conclusion in the feeling of assurance that this happiness produced in him by the sight of the familiar places is not mere momentary pleasure, but life and food for future years.

Again and again this last idea recurs in Wordsworth's poetry. We have it very marked, for instance, in No. xv. of the Poems of Imagination, in which he tells of the impression produced on him, during a lonely walk, by the sudden sight of "a host of golden daffodils,"

"Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I gazed—and gazed—but little thought

What wealth the show to me had brought.

For oft when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude,

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils."

Nothing could be more unlike the lyric poet's usual habit of living in the present, than this lyric poet's conscious saving of the present for future use. He himself tells us that he is of a saving disposition; he collects a winter store of bright summer moments; and there is in this something genuinely human, which is too often overlooked. But there is, above all, something national in it; it is not surprising that English Naturalism should begin by carefully and economically providing itself with a store, a capital, of impressions of nature.

We are all familiar with the feelings that might lead to the attempt. Many of us, gazing on the boundless blue ocean, sparkling in the sunlight, have felt that to have this sight before our eyes every day would widen the soul and cleanse it of all its little meannesses; and we have turned away unwillingly and with the conscious desire to preserve the impression so as to be able to renew its effect. Or with beautiful landscapes before our eyes, especially those which we have seen in the course of travel, with the certainty of not being able to enjoy their beauty soon again, we have tried to be as passive as possible, so as to allow the picture to impress itself firmly on our memory. And we have often instinctively recalled the beautiful scene to mind; for the soul involuntarily calls up bright memories to draw strength and courage from them. But in us such impressions have been almost effaced by stronger ones. We have not been able to preserve them efficaciously for the future, or to ruminate over them again and again. The preoccupations of society and of our own passions have made it impossible for us to find our deepest and most inspiring joy in memories of sunlight falling upon flowers, or of entwisted giant trees. But the soul of the English poet, whose mission it was to re-awaken the feeling for all these elementary moods and impressions, was of a different stamp; unagitated by any practical activity, it vegetated in these day-dreams of natural beauty. And it is undeniable that this constant occupation of himself with the simplest natural impressions, kept his soul pure and free to perceive and to feel beauty in its simple, earthly manifestations, without fancifulness and without excitement.

How rare is this capacity! how often wanting in the very greatest and best minds! And how quickly was it lost again in English poetry! It displays itself most exquisitely and completely in the few lightly-sketched female figures of the short poems. The heroes and heroines of the narrative poems, some of them portrayed with the design of arousing sympathy with the rural population and the lowest classes, others with the intention of edifying, are of distinctly inferior quality. But these few delicately-drawn figures, seen with the same tranquil and yet loving eyes with which Wordsworth looked at trees and birds, are nature itself. They are the English feminine nature; and never have the essential qualities of this nature been more exactly expressed. Take as an example of what I mean, the following little poem:—

"She was a phantom of delight

When first she gleamed upon my sight;

A lovely apparition, sent

To be a moment's ornament;

Her eyes as stars of twilight fair;

Like twilight's too, her dusky hair:

But all things else about her drawn

From May-time and the cheerful dawn;

A dancing shape, an image gay,

To haunt, to startle, and waylay.

I saw her upon nearer view,

A spirit, yet a woman too!

Her household motions light and free,

And steps of virgin liberty;

A countenance in which did meet

Sweet records, promises as sweet;

A creature not too bright or good

For human nature's daily food;

For transient sorrows, simple wiles,

Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears, and smiles.

And now I see with eye serene

The very pulse of the machine;

A being breathing thoughtful breath,

A traveller between life and death;

The reason firm, the temperate will,

Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill;

A perfect woman, nobly planned,

To warn, to comfort, and command;

And yet a spirit still, and bright

With something of angelic light."

This is a genuine, faithful portrait of the pattern English woman; and to compare this sober, truthful description with the ideal women whom the greatest English poets a few years later found satisfaction in depicting, is to prepare an easy victory for Wordsworth. Take Shelley's description, in The Sensitive Plant, of the ethereal protectress of flowers and insects. The picture of the fairy-like beauty is charming, as everything is that comes from Shelley's pen; her tenderness for the plants and her touching compassion for all the small, ugly, despised animals, "the poor banished insects, whose intent, although they did ill, was innocent," are genuine human traits; and yet she is not a real human being, any more than the Witch of Atlas is, or the dim heroine of Epipsychidion. Shelley, like the lark he sang of, was a "scorner of the ground." Or take the passionate Oriental heroines of Byron's earliest poetic narratives—Medora, Gulnare, Kaled. They never attain to the beautiful simplicity of this woman described by Wordsworth. Their passionateness is the principal quality impressed upon us; their love, their devotion, their determination know no bounds. They are heroines invented for readers in whom the numbing life of crowded London and the constant occupation with contemporary great historical events, have induced a kind of nervous craving for the strongest intellectual stimulants. But from the very beginning Wordsworth regarded it as a pleasant and profitable task to show how profoundly men's minds may be moved without the employment of coarse or violent stimulants. He knew that those who were accustomed to striking effects would be unlikely at first to appreciate works the distinguishing feature of which was their soft and natural colouring; but he resolved that he would turn the reader's expectations in the matter of the agencies of a poem back into the natural track.

[1] See Thomas Moore: Memoirs, iii. 161.