The Romantic Poets

Graham Hough

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138640993
• eBook ISBN: 9780429893865
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1953. At its best, Romantic poetry combined the creative freedom of a dream with some of the deepest facts of human experience. In this critical survey, Professor Hough examines individually the poetry of Gray, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats. He sets their work firmly in the context of the major events and preoccupations of the age, clarifying the origins and growth of a poetry that emerged so swiftly and differed so radically from the Augustan age that preceded it. He asserts the importance of the Romantic experience to the tradition of literature, and its significance to the reader of today.

CHAPTER II

WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE

i. THE YOUNG WORDSWORTH

THE scientific and philosophical revolution of the seventeenth century bore its fruit in the eighteenth. Its most obvious result was a general sense of reassuring certainty, a sense that many dark corners had been thoroughly swept and illuminated by clear daylight. Newton had laid bare the nature of the physical world, Locke that of the human mind, and henceforth, though there might be many details to fill in, it was felt that the general scheme of things was pretty well understood. Understood in much the same way as the working of a machine could be understood; Newton’s physics was essentially mechanistic in outlook, and later writers such as Hartley developed from Locke’s premises a mechanistic psychology to match. In philosophical and even in religious discussion mechanical imagery was common. A favourite simile for the universe was “this great machine”, and Pope observed with gratification that a machine which worked so satisfactorily could not be without a plan. This mechanistic tendency was not necessarily irreligious—where there was a plan there must be a planner, and writers like Paley who endeavoured to prove the existence of God from the evidence of the visible creation commonly began with the simile of a watch. If you found one lying on the ground you might not understand its purpose, but you would certainly, as you came to examine it, be obliged to acknowledge in it the evidences of conscious design; and from there you would be led inevitably to the hypothesis of a designer. So it was with the natural world. The more you studied it the more exquisitely it appeared to be contrived, and the more certainly you were led to a reverence and admiration for its Contriver. This type of argument, and the evidence on which, in the eighteenth century, it was based, is seen at its clearest in Paley’s celebrated Natural Theology, an admirably written work, of cheerful and commonsense piety, which afforded the utmost satisfaction to many solid believers, and certainly did nobody any harm. It is, however, possible to object that it affords very little satisfaction to man’s deeper religious apprehensions. If Nature is an excellently contrived machine, then God becomes an extremely skilful Mechanic; and indeed, as has often been remarked, there is little in the rationalistic theology of the eighteenth century to suggest that God is other than the great Engineer who originally designed the machine, set it in motion, and then left it to run by itself. This is in fact the Deist position; and though Theism and Revelation held their own, Deism is probably the central religious movement of the age.¹

Locke’s general philosophical attitude, the cool dry light of his intellect, his preference for clear and distinct ideas, led also to a sharpening of the distinction between what was believed as truth and what was merely enjoyed as fiction. In a writer like Sir Thomas Browne it is commonly hard to be sure in which realm we are moving; mythology and science not only rub shoulders, but often, it appears, enter into some illicit congress. After the beginning of the eighteenth century this is no longer possible; it becomes increasingly necessary to distinguish fancy from philosophy and fable from fact. This becomes clearly evident in poetry and the criticism of poetry. The whole symbolical machinery of earlier poets is now only available as an avowed fiction or an agreeable toy. The business of the sylphs in The Rape of the Lock is satisfactory and successful because nobody was in any sense asked to believe it. Johnson dislikes mythology and the pastoral convention, and condemns Lycidas on that ground. “Its form is that of a pastoral, easy, vulgar and therefore disgusting. … Where there is leisure for fiction there is little grief.” And we have seen the difficulties Gray got into in trying to write poetry other than that of reasonable reflection.

The fact is that the concept of Nature, which seemed at first to offer a liberation from so many barbarous and obscurantist errors, had become by the end of the century a prison-house for the emotions. Nature meant human nature, which the eighteenth century already knew all about, since the Ancients had described it rightly by instinct, and the modern philosophers had further illuminated it by science. It also meant the visible frame of things, whose workings were becoming steadily more familiar. Yet as the universe became ever more well paved and brightly lit there seemed to be less and less on which the emotions could fix themselves with satisfaction. The great machine aroused after all only a temperate reverence, and its Architect a rather distant respect. Those who felt an instinctive need for a stronger and more intimate response to experience were often driven to seek it in fiction, failing to find it in the great world. This is the ultimate motive behind much exploration of mediaeval, Norse and Celtic tradition, behind such literary deceptions as Chatterton’s poems and Macpherson’s Ossian. Yet they were unsatisfactory because they were after all no more than fiction, and some of them plain forgery.

Those born wholly within this well-cultivated garden could hardly expect to find their way out of it; their feet had grown too accustomed to the gravelled footpaths. The experience of the few solitary eccentrics, like Blake, who lived on the shaggy heath outside was too peculiar to be generally accessible to their fellows. The real poetical revolution could only be accomplished by one whose birth and education was within the eighteenth-century cultural pattern, yet on the edge of it, within sight of other kinds of experience. This was Wordsworth’s position. Born at Cockermouth, and early removed to school at Hawkshead on Esthwaite, he grew up on the fringe of a wilder, less tidily economic country than most of rural Britain, and in a society materially and spiritually different from the normal English squirearchy. The “statesmen” of the Westmorland and Cumberland valleys were a race of independent yeomen, the last survivors of an English peasantry, something very different from the tenant-farmers or the landless cap-touching labourers which was all that the enclosures had left in most parts of England. Independence and equality were the keynotes of this society; in his boyhood experience Wordsworth, as he tells us, had hardly met the notion of a social superior. The early experience of a social hierarchy no doubt predisposes the mind to the notion of a hierarchy of accepted ideas. In his remote upland valleys Wordsworth knew neither. All good North-countrymen know that the south (which begins at about Derby) is decadent and feebly conformist. Wordsworth had his share of this feeling, and it helped to create the sturdy individuality without which he could never have transformed the face of English poetry.

On the other hand, at Cambridge a little and more in France, Wordsworth came fully into contact with the most vigorous intellectual life of his day. He inherited the eighteenth-century cultural tradition and received the full impact of contemporary philosophic and political movements. The combined influences of solitude and society, of nature and the converse of men, in forming his mind are described in The Prelude, that incomparable poetic autobiography, which is a better source of information on Wordsworth’s life than anything that has been written about him by others. More than that, and besides being one of the greatest reflective poems in the language it gives us a strongly drawn contemporary picture of the impact of the Revolution on the young sensibilities of the age.

The Prelude was to have been the introduction to The Recluse, a vast philosophical work, of which The Excursion forms the first part, and of which otherwise only a fragment under the original title survives. It is to be suspected that the most vital parts of what Wordsworth had to say were said in The Prelude, and that that is why the design was never completed. It is perhaps best read in the earliest version, that of 1805, for Wordsworth continued to revise it throughout his life; and although the alterations were often improvements, he also, alas, often falsified his own early ideas and impressions to suit the cautious conservatism of his later years. It is no accident that the most beautiful and most spontaneous passages in The Prelude occur chiefly in the first two books, ‘Childhood and Schooltime’, for the impressions of his early years formed the deepest and most significant layer of Wordsworth’s later thought. The picture of a childhood on the shores of Windermere and Esthwaite is an idyllic one, and it would be idle to paraphrase what has been said perfectly once and for all. The central idea of this part of the poem is to show the powerful and necessary bond between nature and the human mind. But nature is no longer the great machine of the eighteenth century; it is a being with a soul and purpose of its own, linked inevitably with the human soul and its purposes. Wordsworth is not writing as a philosopher—he does not set out to explain this relationship, and we do not know whether he sees the soul of the world and the soul of man as separate substances, yet akin and capable of communication, or whether he really holds a kind of pantheism—that the soul of man is a temporarily separated fragment of the totality of being, to which in the end it will return. This pantheist view seems to be suggested by A Slumber did my spirit seal, the last of the Lucy poems, and we find traces of it in Tintern Abbey and elsewhere. Later, Wordsworth tended to disguise it in the interests of Christian orthodoxy, but it always remained, perhaps, the real groundwork of his religion.

The most memorable passages in the early books of The Prelude are not analytical: they are incomparable descriptions of incidents in his childhood where it seemed that he actually felt in Nature a moral and spiritual presence, moulding and working on his mind as a human teacher might have done, though more mysteriously and profoundly. Alone, for instance, on the hills at night, engaged in trapping birds, he fell to the boyish temptation of taking a bird from another’s snare. But the invisible monitor is watchful over even this venial fault, and as soon as the deed was done

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.

(I. 329)²

Though Wordsworth insists constantly, both here and elsewhere, on the moral influence of Nature, the dominant impression is not of being watched over by a censorious mentor, but of communion with a vast invisible presence, felt perhaps at the most unlikely times, when climbing rocks after birds’ nests, for instance, an object which he admits to be a mean one: yet the danger of the slippery crags and the closeness of his contact with them brings a half-physical, half-spiritual sense of communion with something beyond the visible frame of things.

Oh at that time

When on the perilous ridge I hung alone

With what strange utterance did the loud dry wind

Blow through my ears The sky seemed not a sky

Of earth, and with what motion moved the clouds.

(I. 346)

Rowing on the lake one night, he observed before him a huge peak which suddenly appeared to him as an animated presence, ‘as if with voluntary power instinct’ and seemed to stride after him ‘with measured motion, like a living thing’:

and after I had seen

That spectacle, for many days, my brain

Worked with a dim and undetermined sense

Of unknown modes of being; in my thoughts

There was a darkness, call it solitude,

Or blank desertion, no familiar shapes

Of homely objects, images of trees,

Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields;

But huge and mighty Forms that do not live

Like living men, mov’d slowly through the mind

By day and were a trouble to my dreams.

(I. 417)

The occasion itself is trivial: yet what is being described is evidently close to mystical experience: and it is such experience that is at the source of Wordsworth’s most living work. Wordsworth, too, is being led to God by the contemplation of Nature: but by a different route from Paley’s Natural Theology.

It is a temptation to linger among these early scenes, to dwell particularly on the incomparable descriptions of simple animal joys, of skating, fishing, exploring the islands on Windermere. But if we did there would be no end to quotation. It is noticeable that there is little mention of intellectual influences; when in a later section he writes ostensibly of books the only ones actually mentioned are Don Quixote and The Arabian Nights. He goes out of his way to depreciate scientific thought; addressing Coleridge, the friend for whom the Prelude was written, he says with satisfaction

to thee

Science appears but what in truth she is,

Not as our glory and our absolute boast,

But as a succedaneum, and a prop

To our infirmity. (II. 216)

The third book, on residence at Cambridge, has a pious interest for Cambridge men, but is plainly written with a lower degree of intensity than what precedes it. Wordsworth’s most vivid experiences did not come to him in his undergraduate days, which appear mostly as an interlude of careless and cheerful companionship and some uncertainty of purpose—

And more than all, a strangeness in my mind,

A feeling that I was not for that hour,

Nor for that place. (III. 80)

In those spacious and unregenerate days the demands of a formal syllabus were not exacting, and if mediocrity was given little stimulus to screw itself up a few painful inches higher, genius was left to its own devices. Wordsworth studied English and Italian poetry, and showed some aptitude though little love for mathematics. It is noticeable that whenever the springs of Wordsworth’s emotional life temporarily fail he can fall back on a perfectly competent logical intellect. For all the apparent aimlessness of his youth, there was a strong element of hard northern common sense in Wordsworth: and though he was never one of those who mainly approached the world through the channels of a formal education, he made himself perfectly capable of using the goods of the mind for his own purpose. What that purpose was became clear to him in his first long vacation, when in a walk on the mountains, returning home after a cheerful party, he realized as dawn broke that he was going to be a poet.

A holiday journey to France and Switzerland in 1790 provided the material for Descriptive Sketches, written in couplets in the manner of the eighteenth-century topographical poets, and written well enough, but without much sign of Wordsworth’s individual power. More important than the scenery, however, was the political atmosphere; and it is from now onwards that political and public events begin to play a major part in Wordsworth’s development. The air of Cambridge is commonly sympathetic to other people’s revolutions, and Wordsworth and his fellow-traveller Jones were already prepared to be ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• I GRAY
• II WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE
• III BYRON
• IV SHELLEY
• V KEATS
• A Short Bibliography
• Index of Works Discussed