Wordsworth and the Classics

WORDSWORTH AND THE CLASSICS DOUGLAS' BUSH W HILE every age considers its estimate of great writers of the past to be the true and final one, we of the present may' perhaps be allowed to think that in some essential ways we are closer to the real Wordsworth than even Arnold was, though Arnold, according to Quiller-Couch, had a tendency 'to regard himself as Wordsworth's widow. The Victorians, beset by science and scepticism, and groping for an undogmatic faith, reverenced the poet who gave them a natural religion; we, who have got far beyond such naive gropings~ and recoil from a plaster embodi... ment of virtue and nobility, feel, a new respect for the poet w~o gave to society a natural daughter. Words- 'worth has become, so to speak, one of ourselves, and we can look at him as at any inhabitant of our brave new world. (I have sometimes thought that nothing would contribute so much to another critical rehabilitation as the discovery that Frances Ridley ,Havergal was the qp.ughter of Tennyson and, say, Geraldine Jewsbury). But, apart from chatter about Caroline, we do understand Wordsworth . and his hackground better than the Victorians did. We know that some of his essential roots were in the so-called age of reason, we know more about his philosophic and poetic evolution, we do not neglect the Prelude and the Excursion, and we recognize Wordsworth as the most richly germinal of all the romantic poets. A popular notion, not yet quite dead, has pictured a prematurely cow-like son of Cumberland, ruminating, forever in the fields, sometimes lowering a rustic bucket into the deep well of his own consciousness and bringing up a poem which, whether good or bad, was a purely 359 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY personal" effusion", and owed little or nothing to Iiterary tradition. We have become aware, rather belatedly," that, in spite of weak eyes, Wordsworth was from his youth up an ardent readel' in English and foreign literature . Even as a child"of the mountains, he says in th~ eleven" th book of the Prelude, and before he had read the classics, he had "learnt to dream of Sicily", and he goes on "to salute Theocritus. In addition to the open and tacit evidence of his prefaces and notes and many poems, a glance at the catalogue of his library ought to have killed long ago the legend of his indifference to books. "Among his nearly three thousand volumes-and Wordsworth had neither the vanity nor the money to buy books for show-were enough classical authors to do credit to a college don. He had a special interest in ancient history. And, to come to our subject proper, this poet of man and nature .was, strange as it may, sound, the fountain-head from which flowed much of " the great stream of nineteenth-century poetry on -classical themes. It was he more than anyone els~for we need not take much account of the melodious" blessings of Tighe" and her kind-who revived the classical genre and prescribed its manner and moral tone. The classical poems of Tennyson, for instance, are in the didactic tradition of Laodamia, though their style has -been coloured by Keats, and Keats's conception of myth, we remember, owed much to Wordsworth. The lover of Ovid's Metamorphoses was the .boy who revelled in the Arabian Nights, who was later thankful that his early passion for romance had not been snuffed out by Rousseauistic educators, and who, later stilf, protested against Niebuhr's scientific destruction of the heroic legends of Roman history. But the note on Lycoris must be quoted at length: 360 WORDSWORTH , AND THE CLASSICS "But surely one who has written so much in verse as I have done may be allowed to retrace his steps in the regions of fancy which delighted him in his boyhood, when he first became acquainted with the Greek and Roman poets. Before I read Virgil I was so strongly attached to Ovid, whose Metamorphoses I read at school, that I was quite in a passion whenever I found him, in books of criticism, placed below Virgil. As...