Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

"He gave the people of his best,
His worst he kept, his best he gave,

My curse upon the clown and knave
Who will not let his ashes rest.”

All this is true; and the publication of unnecessary detail in reference to the lives of great men is a scandal, and a crime against human nature; but, in proportion as this is understood and acted upon, our legitimate curiosity in reference to their lives and deeds is invariably whetted.

It is of course no more possible, in the biography of a poet, to state the circumstances under which all his poems were composed,* than it is to estimate the place which each poem holds in literature; and no biographer can unfold the full story of a life, and least of all of a literary life. To do so, he would require to estimate the antecedent influences which shaped it into form, and that would involve digression at every turn. To be exhaustive in this way is impossible, and would be very undesirable. It is even possible that "critical reviews," as they are called, are, on the whole, misleading. Even a running biographical commentary, placed alongside of the biographical facts, is aptwith all its value, and all its charm, when deftly made-to distract the mind of the reader from the subject of the biography, and to put before him a possibly transient judgment, in place of what he ought to know, viz., the permanent work of the poet. In these volumes, therefore, I shall for the most part give the facts, and leave commentary alone.

It must also be remembered that we already possess much and very valuable criticism on Wordsworth. Scores of books, and many scores of magazine articles have been written, some of them so excellent excellent that a new

* The task has been attempted, so far, in the notes to this edition of his works.

writer may well pause before presuming to add another stone to the monumental cairn. The critical estimates by Coleridge and his daughter Sara, by Lamb, Southey, Scott, De Quincey, Landor, Wilson, and Hazlitt amongst contemporaries, by Henry Taylor, Clough, Shairp, Arnold, Stopford Brooke, Aubrey De Vere, Leslie Stephen, Hutton, Henry Reid, Mason, F. Myers, and Hudson amongst more recent writers, in addition to what has been issued in the "Transactions of the Wordsworth Society," - form a mass of literary judgment by competent minds from opposite points of view, and may well disincline any novice from the task of additional criticism. It is true that, in the preface to the first volume of this edition of the poems, I was rash enough to promise a "critical essay" on the poet; and I have the substance of such an essay almost ready for publication, but materials far more valuable for an estimate of the poet's life have accumulated so much that I feel bound to postpone the essay still. My present function is a much humbler one, viz., to tie together with a slender biographic thread the narrative of the lives of Wordsworth and his sister, and of those who were inseparably connected with them in poetic labour, in such a way that nothing of importance is omitted from it, and thus to arrange the materials on which future critics may work.

A second difficulty I have had to encounter is that many of the most important facts in reference to Wordsworth are already before the world. These I cannot merely repeat, and yet to omit all mention of them would seriously mar the picture of the man. A new biographer is in this dilemma. If he includes all things worth mentioning that happen to be already recorded, readers may say, 'We have heard of this before.' If he omits them, and merely refers to the sources where they may be found, other readers will ask, 'Why have we not the full biography before us now?' Since, however, many of the notes to the

poems in the previous volumes of this edition are biographical—especially the notes to The Prelude-I have, at times, merely referred to what will be found by turning up these volumes.

The mention of The Prelude recalls the fact that no poet, and scarcely any other literary man, has given so remarkable a disclosure of his own character and personality,

of the very springs of his life, and of the influences that moulded him, as Wordsworth has done. That autobiography stands quite alone amongst the lives of poets, as Descartes' treatise On Method stands alone amongst the lives of philosophers, and perhaps the Confessions of St Augustine amongst those of divines. I believe it will be increasingly appreciated with the lapse of time. It is singularly graphic and rich in detail, and for this reason frequent reference must be made to it in the chapters on Hawkshead and on France. The delineation of character is so vivid, so stereoscopic, that even in the most prosaic passages one forgets the medium through which it is presented, in the light of the disclosure itself.

The Fenwick notes, too, are full of biographic incident. It was a happy thought of Miss Fenwick to get the aged poet to dictate these memoranda to her. Some have said that his memory was not to be trusted at the age of seventy-five; but the few inaccuracies which they contain are the merest trifles; and the notes are not more garrulous or gossipy than every one wishes an old man of genius, a poet and a teacher, to be. The marvel is, that they are so full of minute detail, and yet so very accurate. How many men can recall even ten years of their life, and give an accurate report of it? And then-how little is there usually worth recording!

As to the Memoirs of Wordsworth by his nephew, the late Bishop of Lincoln, it has been a fashion in some quarters to despise that book, either as heterogeneous, or as too eulogistic, or again as too diffuse. I cannot agree with the

censure it has received. It may be, in some respects, a dull book; but, written as it was in the summer after the poet died, necessarily in haste, and without many of the detailed facts which we now possess, it is a remarkable book; and, with the exception of the Grasmere Journals and the letters of Wordsworth and of his sister not then known, it remains the chief quarry whence the materials for any subsequent life of the poet must be obtained. In every respect it is absolutely indispensable to the student of Wordsworth. With all their desultoriness, it is to these Memoirs that we must go back, amid the miscellaneous mass of opinion, &c., for facts, elsewhere undiscoverable; and, although I think that something has to be added to them, in order to a full and adequate knowledge of the poet as he was, it is more than a mistake to disparage these volumes. Posterity will find this out.

It has often been said, and sometimes given as a reason against rewriting the life of Wordsworth, that there were no remarkable incidents in his life, and that, therefore, it had no great public interest. Others are of opinion that no lives are so interesting as those of literary men of the highest order, of men who not only by their thoughts, but the way in which these thoughts have been unfolded and embodied -have become the teachers of their own and of subsequent generations. It is of great interest, doubtless, to follow the career of a great statesman or an administrator, of the leader of a party, the discoverer of a hidden law of nature, or the inventor of some new contrivance for the benefit of mankind; but the more silent lives of those who have enriched the world by the legacy of great thoughts, and who by opening up new channels of emotion, and quickening aspiration, have added to the sources of our joy, are quite as worthy of record, and quite as interesting to the race. It is not the lives that have been most crowded with incident or adventure that have necessarily the most to teach.

[ocr errors]

CHAPTER II.

COCKERMOUTH.

THE ancestry of the Wordsworths may be traced back to the fourteenth century. In the reign of Edward III. a Wordsworth family had settled at Penistone, in the south of the county of York, not far from Sheffield. "It is scarcely possible," says the author of the Genealogical Memoranda of the Family, "to refer to any deed of the period between the latter half of the fourteenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth, which related to property or to ecclesiastical or civil matters in the parish of Penistone, without coming across the name of some member of the family of Wordsworth, either as principal or witness. The name was variously spelt-Wurdesworth, Wadysworth, Wadesworth, Wadisworth, Wordesworth, Wordisworth, Wordysworth, Wadsworth, Wordsworthe, Wodesworth, and Wordsworth. Some members of the family at the present time spell the name Wadsworth, and others Wordsworth. . . . The earliest deed in which the name occurs is dated 1392, when one Nicholas Wordesworth appears as one of the witnesses to the same."*

In the reign of Henry VIII. a William Wordsworth of Penistone hit upon a novel but effective plan of recording his pedigree, by carving the names of four generations of his

* Genealogical Memoranda of the Family of Wordsworth, by Edwin Jackson Bedford, privately printed, 1851. Compare Hunter's History of the Deanery of Doncaster, and Percy's Note to "The Dragon of Wantley" in his Reliques of Ancient Poetry, vol. iii., p. 296.

« AnteriorContinuar »