from the sun, the shadows lengthened, it was night. This reads very affectedly, and is not an accurate or truthful record of what any one feels. The weakness of this argument, however, is that we do not, as modern men, feel that Nature sympathises with us in the same constant and unvarying manner that we feel the sun falls. If the instance were perfect it would suffice, but it is not perfect. It is imperfect in two ways: in the way stated about our casual feeling, and in a further and contrary way. We know, when we say the sun falls, that it does not fall, that to say it falls is simply a manner of speech. We do not know when we say Nature sympathises with us that she does not sympathise. We do not know that to say she sympathises is merely a manner of speech. That is not an accurate account of what happens in our minds. What happens in our minds, when Wordsworth tells us that Nature sympathises, is that we are troubled. We do not know that she does, but we are by no means as certain that she does not as we are certain that the sun is comparatively stationary. The amount of subjective truth in the two instances is different; and the amount of subjective truth in Wordsworth's doctrine does not explain, at all adequately, what we feel about its inner truth. Nor will any other mechanical explanation of our half assent quite satisfy us. It may be said, of course, that while Wordsworth's doctrine of a sympathising Nature is opposed to what we know of scientific fact, we do know that there is a correspondent alteration. Nature is not affected by the moods of man, but man is affected by the moods of Nature. The day is not dreary because I am sad, but I am miserable without the sun. June is not June because people wed, but they wed because it is June. This is true, but to explain Wordsworth's philosophy of Nature by saying it is a truth stated the wrong way round is a child's trick. The real explanation is much wider, and embraces all these attempted answers. What Wordsworth's Nature poetry emphasises is the intimate connection between Nature's life and our own. When all is said, we are human because we can read Nature, and we interpret everything in her terms. Nature does 'enter into mysterious and wonder-working union with the spirit of man.' She does speak to us and we speak her tongue. This Universe is our home. 'Man is placed in the centre of things, and a ray of relation passes from every other being to him.' We make use of everything in Nature, the tree and the earth bone' to build houses, the flax to make us clothes. 'Words are signs of natural facts. Right means straight, wrong means twisted.' . . . 'It is not words only that are emblematic, it is things which are emblematic.' 'Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.' 'Light and darkness are familiar expressions for knowledge and ignorance.' From Nature also we do gain a reinforcement of moral quality, tranquillity from the sky, firmness from the rock, equanimity from the plain. Our lives, at their highest, find an appropriate setting in natural surroundings. 1 This argument is wiser than the present writer was. I am indebted to an admirable piece of writing in the Manchester Guardian (Nov. 8, 1904) criticising an essay I published in that year. Leonidas dies in 'the steep defile of Thermopyla.' 'The boat of Columbus' glides in among the Savannahs of the West. The body rests in the quiet earth. How is it that a woman reminds us of a flower, and the evening of death? What song does Spring sing in our ear?1 Wordsworth's poetry, like all the greatest poetry, is based upon the fact, and it is perhaps greatest in this, that it bears witness, more than any other poetry, to the chief fact of life. It is its peculiar office to remind us that we are a part of a whole, a whole which is cousin to us, and which speaks to us in each activity, from the flame in the grate to the incandescence of the stars. For the purposes of this relation, it does not matter whether Nature or Man brings most to the other. The Universe is there for us to interpret, but it is not dumb. It is not dumb because in it there breathes the life which is also ours. 1 The quotations are from Emerson's Nature. 122 POETRY AND PROSE BYRON WORDSWORTH represents best the attitude of soul which was the Revolution's, Shelley its inner idea, and Coleridge its romantic afflatus; but if the historian wishes to see how the ordinary man of the period was affected by that vast and new movement, he will not turn to Wordsworth, Coleridge, or Shelley, he will turn to Byron. He represents best the effect of the Revolution. A sea scourged into commotion tells you better what a storm does than the thunder and lightning; and Byron's representation is wide enough to represent, not the English effect alone, but the European effect. So variously, episodically, and unreasoningly does he respond, that you get in his poems just the impetus and upheaval produced over the whole Continent. Chief of all, he is the poet of his time; he is not a minor writer, the bigness of his spirit enables him to represent the effect of big forces as no minor writer can; and his huge basis of ordinariness is of this happy service to him that it makes him easily typical of popular results. As Wordsworth felt the Revolution, few could feel it; as Byron felt it, every one. Allowing for the added intensity, the larger scale of a big nature, his responses were the responses of all. He set the emotions of the crowd to music, their various and often contradictory emotions, pre-Revolutionary, Revolutionary, and post-Revolutionary; the whole con tents of the disturbed ordinary European mind. This is one of the reasons why he was read so much abroad, and it is one of the reasons for his established place in our literature. What he did was not a little thing to do; no one else did it. There is always only one who can ever do any given thing perfectly. Byron perfectly represents - indeed Byron is, pre-Revolutionary man as affected by the Revolution. To fill a rôle of this kind many qualities are necessary, and the nicest arrangement of circumstances. The circumstances of Byron at once set him firmly in the established order, and introduced an atmosphere of disturbance from the start. He came of the class that for the last hundred and fifty years had ruled England, and while still at Harrow became a member of the oligarchic council. He was provided with a stake in the country and a platform when in his teens. At the same time, he was not born in the purple; his home was poor (the typical cottage opposite the Park gate), he had a club foot which offended him, and a mother with a gusty temper. As full of worldly sensibility as of worldliness, he dissolves in tears when first saluted as Dominus. From Harrow he proceeded to Cambridge, where, studying boxing and keeping a tame bear, he condescended upon the modest love for letters, then prevalent in that sober place, by publishing a book of poems with the contemptuous title Hours of Idleness. It is safe to say that no volume less fruitful in promise was ever produced by a poet subsequently eminent. And though, fortified with subsequent knowledge, we may find in these trifles some of the dispositions which Byron maintained or developed later, especially |