On Wordsworth

stormy youth offers at first sight a striking contrast to the apparent tranquillity of his maturity and age.'*

The contrast, as stated, seems not only striking but almost alarming. It hardly seems as if one juvenile love affair, however improper, was sufficient to turn Words-worth into a stormy character. And why does the publisher or editor employ that dark and sinister phrase, "The apparent tranquillity of his maturity and age"? Are we to infer that Wordsworth at the age of seventy or eighty was still secretly painting the town red; and writing a sonnet on Westminster Bridge at daybreak when he came home with the milk? Can it be insinuated that even as a Victorian under Queen Victoria he continued but concealed his orgies? I hasten to say that I am well aware that this cannot be the meaning of the phrase; but the phrase seems to me unluckily selected. Presumably the word "stormy" really refers rather to his exultation in the great political storm; that is, his early sympathy with the French Revolution. Stevenson classed it among the baffling incongruities of genius that Wordsworth wore blue spectacles. We may admit, symbolically speaking, that he did at one time look at revolution through red spectacles; and perhaps at modern political theories through rose-coloured spectacles. But it is clear from this biography, as from any other, that he very rapidly lost that rosy vision; and, with or without the help o£ spectacles, relapsed quite sufficiently into the blues. The youth, to quote his own words of an even earlier illumination, may be the vision splendid, have been on his way attended; but certainly the man perceived it die away and fade into the light of common day. And it is only fair to say that Words-worth, at his best, could sometimes do more than most people with the light of common day; and even make it in flashes, like the light that never was on sea or land. Anyhow, we may submit that this greater Words-worth would have been easier to present as The Earlier Wordsworth than as The Later Wordsworth. Though Miss Bacho writes with considerable spirit in defence of his whole career, especially in the later chapters, it is inevitable that there should be this relative flatness in the later life. The book is bound to consist far too much of mere records of what the old gentleman thought of the politics of his time; which was often pretty much what all the other old gentlemen were thinking of the politics of their time, or rather of a time that was no longer really theirs. She does succeed in showing, however, that he retained some real popular sympathies and generous social ideas down to the day of his death; as, for instance, that, in a matter like the Ten Hour Bill, the old Tory was on the side of the poor where many Radicals were on the side of the rich. But the chief impression left by her apologia is a curious vein of reflection upon the contradictions and inversions of all that strange period of history that stretches from the French Revolution to the Russian Revolution. William Words-worth does really stand as a representative figure in all that transition; the more because he was charged with changing so much; and yet more again, because he really changed so little.

There is something that is always discovered by men if they live long enough; and Wordsworth lived very-long; quite long enough to discover it, though he did not say very much about it. It is something quite distinct from his reaction against revolution in early middle age; indeed, it is not merely a reaction against revolution; it is quite as much a reaction against reaction. It might be called the fact that the world goes round; as distinct from the fact that the world goes on. It is quite consistent with the admission that in some respects the world may go on; or that it does go on. The point is that the young very often mistake for the movement of going on, what is, so far, only the movement of going round. Between fourteen and forty, a man sees a great tide coming in and another tide ebbing away; and associates the first with the future and the second with the past. But by the time he is fifty, he has generally begun to realize what is meant by ebb and flow, and by the turn of the tide. He may even happen to be in favour of the tide that is flowing today; or he may look forward to the counter-flood that may flow tomorrow; but he does not think that the movement tomorrow is certain to be a mere extension of the movement today. Of course, I abjure with horror the heresy that human wills are controlled like tides; I heartily agree that humanity is not forced to go backwards and forwards, any more than it is forced to go forward or to go back. But in practical experience the human being generally does go back. And he goes back for one of the commonest and most practical reasons for going back: because he has left something behind. There is such a thing as social wreck, like the wreck of Robinson Crusoe's ship. There is such a thing as social progress, like the progress of Robinson Crusoe's farm. But where the philosophers are wrong and the romancer is right, and indeed very realistic, is that Robinson Crusoe will have to go back very often to the wreck in order to stock or furnish the farm. When there really is anything like the building of a new civilization, it means that there has been a great deal of quarrying in the ruins of the old civilization. When there is only a false start, a half-built farmhouse, a half-baked culture and bankruptcy, it means that the reformers have tried to simplify life too much; they have left behind them all that they wanted most.

It is a proverb that Wordsworth outlived the triumph of his first political ideal. It is less noticed that he also outlived the triumph o£ his second political ideal. The vision of the Holy Alliance, as seen by Alexander, was quite as Apocalyptic as the vision o£ the Republic One and Indivisible as seen by Robespierre. Wordsworth, as an Englishman, might call himself a Tory; but English Tories had a good deal to do with discouraging the second vision as well as the first. Perhaps it would be an exaggeration to say that Pitt killed the Revolution and Canning killed the Reaction. But at least a man learned in time that revolution and reaction alternately kill each other. The world that Wordsworth saw growing around him, in his old age, was not the world of liberty promised by the Jacobins or the peace of Christendom promised by the Kings. It was an urban and suburban world, which would have been hated by Wordsworth quite as much as by Shelley. It was full of a crude and Cockney philosophy of competition. Wordsworth lived long enough finally to resent and resist that advancing fashion. If Wordsworth had lived a little longer, he would have seen it as a retreating fashion, as a vanishing fashion. He would have found the flat contrary of competition, Socialism and even Communism, coming in as the religion of the future. But he would have been wrong again, if he had thought that it was the religion of the future. By this time, we have got another religion of the future, exactly the opposite; Fascism, and probably they none of them will really live to be the religion of the future at all.

XXXI On Facing Facts

WE talk o£ people living in the past; and it is commonly applied to old people or old-fashioned people. But, in fact, we all live in the past, because there is nothing else to live in. To live in the present is like proposing to sit on a pin. It is too minute, it is too slight a support, it is too uncomfortable a posture, and it is of necessity followed immediately by totally different experiences, analogous to those of jumping up with a yell. To live in the future is a contradiction in terms. The future is dead; in the perfectly definite sense that it is not alive. It has no nature, no form, no feature, no vaguest character of any kind except what we choose to project upon it from the past. People talk about the dead past; but the past is not in the least dead, in the sense in which the future is dead. The past can move and excite us, the past can be loved and hated, the past consists largely of lives that can be considered in their completion; that is, literally in the fullness of life. But nobody knows anything about any living thing in the future, except what he chooses to make up, by his own imagination, out of what he regrets in the past or what