134 The Future Poetry
and considered, nor the sureness of an inspired interpretation
were at his command. But sometimes language and movement
rise suddenly into a bare and powerful sincerity which, if he
could have maintained it, would have given him the needed
instrument: but the patience and artistic conscientiousness or
the feeling for poetic truth which could alone have done this,
were far from him. Considerable work of a secondary kind he
did, but he had something greater to say which he never said,
but only gave rare hints of it and an obscured sense of the
presence of its meaning.
Wordsworth, with a much higher poetic mind than Byron’s,
did not so entirely miss his greatest way, though he wandered
much in adjacent paths and finally lost himself in the dry desert
sands of the uninspired intellectual mentality. At the beginning
he struck in the midst of some alloy full into his purest vein
of gold. His earliest vision of his task was the right vision,
and whatever may be the general truth of his philosophy of
childhood in the great Ode, it seems to have been true of him.
For as intellectuality grew on him, the vision failed; the first
clear intimations dimmed and finally passed leaving behind an
unillumined waste of mere thought and moralising. But always,
even from the beginning, it got into the way of his inspiration.
Yet Wordsworth was not a wide thinker, though he could bring
a considerable weight of thought to the aid of the two or three
great things he felt and saw lucidly and deeply, and he was
unfitted to be a critic of life of which he could only see one
side with power and originality, — for the rest he belongs to
his age rather than to the future and is limited in his view of
religion, of society, of man by many walls of convention. But
what the poet sees and feels, not what he opines, is the real
substance of his poetry. Wordsworth saw Nature and he saw
man near to Nature, and when he speaks of these things, he
finds either his noblest or his purest and most penetrating tones.
His view of them is native to his temperament and personality
and at the opposite pole to Byron’s. Not that which is wild,
dynamic or tumultuously great in Nature, but her calm, her
serenity, the soul of peace, the tranquil Infinite, the still, near,