LECTURE IX. At the beginning of these Lectures, we traced that which is called the Poetry of Man from Pope to the close of the life of Cowper. We found in his poetry a number of new ideas on the subject of mankind, the main characteristic of which was, that they all rested on the thought of an universal mankind, which in itself supposed the equality of all men in certain realms of thought and act. The ideas were new and revolutionary, but in Cowper they took no clear form. They floated in solution, they were not crystallized; they were the product of insensible not recognised influences of the time; mere green shoots of things which were to become mighty trees; the substance in faith of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen; sparks of a kindling fire scattered only here and there, but full of a life whose first property was the will and the power to devour things too old and too corrupt to live. No one suspected then that they would burst into flame with such accumulating rapidity; but a few years only had passed by when they rose into a conflagration which, in the French Revolution, ran over the European world. In England the fire did not fall upon the State, but its inspiration, and the passionate emotion which attended it, fell upon the poets; and out of the hearts of Coleridge and Wordsworth the poetry of universal Man, of freedom, of equal rights, of infinite promise, of the overthrow of tyranny, leaped full-grown into a manhood which has never endured decay. It is the history of its influence on Wordsworth's mind which we have now to trace and to explain. We have seen that this development of the poetry of Man in Wordsworth was preceded by that of the poetry of Nature. I have worked out that in the previous lectures, and an astonishing growth it is-so astonishing in comparison with the work on the same subject done by Cowper, Crabbe, and Burns, that it seems, at first sight, inexplicable. But the first explanation of its rapidity is one already alluded to in the history of the growth of the poetry of natural description. It was in reality no swift creation, but the flowering of a plant that had already clothed itself with leaves and had nothing more to do but flower. It is true that the whole plant was covered almost in an instant with a mass of flowers, and their extraordinary richness of flowerage needs a further explanation. It is supplied when we realize that the long European movement which so suddenly took form in the French Revolution had reached in Wordsworth's early life that point of expansion which only needs a touch to cause the outburst. For at such a time there is that profound but latent excitement in which the minds of the Poets, who are the first to feel excitements, become swiftly creative on all subjects within their range; when the work of a century is often done in a year. Supply a new and quickening element to the soil of the Poet's thought, let the air which it breathes become nipping and eager, and things which have only been in leaf within him, will cover their every spray with flowers. One more explanation of this apparent rapidity is that the revolutionary movement contained within it a particular excitement on the subject of Nature. It took form in France in Rousseau's love of wild nature, in his thought that Nature was wiser, simpler, and greater than Man; but in him it was mixed with the ugliest imposition of his own diseased feelings on Nature. It took form in Germany in the songs of the young Poets who stormed and raged in verse till Goethe, who had himself in his youthful time out-thundered the others, raised his tranquillizing head above the waves. It had been growing into form for the last hundred years in England; and we find that, partly influenced by Rousseau, it preferred, shortly before Cowper, the wild and lonely landscape in which men could feel sentimental; next, it preferred the wilder and lonelier scenes for their own sake, and having felt them profoundly, it then became connected with the poetry of Man. The Poets transferred their love of this wild nature to the men who lived in it, and looked on them as certain to be nobler and more independent than they could be in cities and the artificial world. was there we ought to seek for the primæval and pure feelings of men; and Wordsworth, in the love which he bore to the shepherds, and the honour he paid to his own dalesmen, was following up to its legitimate conclusion that excitement on the subject of wild nature which was now one of the elements of the European disturbance. We have thus been led, in thinking of the revolutionary It movement as it bore on the idea of Nature, to the very point at which we left Wordsworth in the last lecture, when he had been led by the love of Nature to the love of Man. He had arrived, in solitude, and following his natural individuality, at the same point to which the world was being led by its new impulse, but the impulse had of course its insensible influence upon him. He was now fitted to become a part of it, and to consciously join in it. He had been led by the love of Nature to the love of the simple men among whom he lived. Passing into the world and mingling with men, he carried with him the teaching of Nature, and applied it to his conception of mankind. The self-investigation that Nature had forced upon him; the sense of the preeminent dignity of the human soul that he had learnt from her; and the previous conception he had formed of Nature as One, led him to investigate human nature, to recognize then its pre-eminent dignity, and finally to see mankind as One Being whose life and rights and powers and place in the world, whose origin and whose destiny he was above all bound to study. The revolutionary idea of one universal humanity began to germinate in his mind. A multitude of vague, formless thoughts on this subject were floating in the air. He breathed them, but as yet neither he nor anyone had been able to realize them, for they were not made clear by being arranged under a few leading thoughts. It was this which the French Revolution did for him and for the world. It gave sudden, clear, and terrible form to the long-prepared ideas of Europe; it placed the movement in which all had been sharing on lines on which it could run along to a known end. It did the work of the Prophet for the world; it gave voice to the voiceless passion of a million hearts. It said, Man is one and indivisible, and it attempted to carry out that idea and all its resulting thoughts in politics and society. How far it had anything to do with Christianity, and how it influenced Wordsworth, is the subject of my lecture. It did not, as I have hinted, come on Wordsworth unprepared. He was himself a natural republican. He had been born in a poor district, in a primitive homely corner of English ground, and he had rarely seen, during his schoolday time the "face of one vested with respect through claims of wealth or blood;" and when he passed to the University it was, he says, one of its benefits, that it held up to his view something of a Republic. All stood there on equal ground, men were brothers there in honour; distinction lay open to all alike, and wealth and title were less than industry and genius. Moreover, he had learnt obedience to the presence of God's power in the sovereignty of nature; and again, fellowship with venerable books had sanctioned the proud workings of the soul And mountain liberty. It could not be, he says, But that one tutored thus should look with awe Upon the faculties of man, receive Gladly the highest promises, and hail As best, the government of equal rights And to this natural republicanism he traces his first indifference on the outbreak of the Revolution. It did |