Wordsworth meets them with the assurance that
he has much to give them, and of a very peculiar kind, if they will
follow a certain difficult way, and seems to possess the secret of
some special mental illumination. To follow that way is an
initiation, by which they will become able to distinguish, in art,
speech, feeling, manners, in men and life generally, what is genuine,
animated, and expressive from what is only conventional and
derivative, and therefore inexpressive.
A very intimate sense of the expressiveness of outward things, which
ponders, listens, penetrates, where the earlier, less developed
consciousness passed lightly by, is an important element in the
general temper of our modern poetry. Critics of literary history
have again [96] and again remarked upon it; it is a characteristic
which reveals itself in many different forms, but is strongest and
most sympathetic in what is strongest and most serious in modern
literature; it is exemplified by writers as unlike Wordsworth as the
French romanticist poets. As a curious chapter in the history of the
human mind, its growth might be traced from Rousseau and St. Pierre
to Chateaubriand, from Chateaubriand to Victor Hugo; it has no doubt
some obscure relationship to those pantheistic theories which have
greatly occupied people's minds in many modern readings of
philosophy; it makes as much difference between the modern and the
earlier landscape art as there is between the roughly outlined masks
of a Byzantine mosaic and a portrait by Reynolds or Romney.
Pages:
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91