Part 12

Moreover, a mild climate and copious rainfall have tempered this natural asperity of surface by spreading over the lower parts of the fells and the bottoms of the dales a greener mantle than is to be seen among the mountains further north. Though the naked rock abundantly shows itself, it has been so widely draped with herbage and woodland as to combine the luxuriance of the lowlands with the near neighbourhood of bare cliff and craggy scar.

Such was the scenery amidst which William Wordsworth was born and spent most of his long life. Thence he drew the inspiration which did so much to quicken the English poetry of the nineteenth century, and which has given to his dales and hills so cherished a place in our literature. The scenes familiar to him from infancy were loved by him to the end with an ardent and grateful affection which he never wearied of publishing to the world. No mountain-landscapes had ever before been drawn so fully, so accurately, and in such felicitous language. Every lineament of his hills and dales is depicted as luminously and faithfully in his verse as it is reflected on the placid surface of his beloved meres, but suffused by him with an ethereal glow of human sympathy. He drew from his mountain-landscape everything that

'Can give an inward help, can purify And elevate, and harmonize and soothe.'

It brought to him 'authentic tidings of invisible things'; and filled him with

'The sense Of majesty and beauty and repose, A blended holiness of earth and sky.'

For his obligations to that native scenery he found continual expression.

'Ye mountains and ye lakes, And sounding cataracts, ye mists and winds That dwell among the hills where I was born, If in my youth I have been pure in heart, If, mingling with the world, I am content With my own modest pleasures, and have lived With God and Nature communing, removed From little enmities and low desires-- The gift is yours.'

Not only did his observant eye catch each variety of form, each passing tint of colour on his hills and valleys, he felt, as no poet before his time had done, the might and majesty of the forces by which, in the mountain-world, we are shown how the surface of the world is continually modified.

'To him was given Full many a glimpse of Nature's processes Upon the exalted hills.'

The thought of these glimpses led to one of the noblest outbursts in the whole range of his poetry, where he gives way to the exuberance of his delight in feeling himself, to use Byron's expression, 'a portion of the tempest'--

'To roam at large among unpeopled glens And mountainous retirements, only trod By devious footsteps; regions consecrate To oldest time; and reckless of the storm, ... while the mists Flying, and rainy vapours, call out shapes And phantoms from the crags and solid earth, ... and while the streams Descending from the region of the clouds, And starting from the hollows of the earth, More multitudinous every moment, rend Their way before them--what a joy to roam An equal among mightiest energies!'

In this passage Wordsworth seems to have had what he would have called 'a foretaste, a dim earnest' of that marvellous enlargement of the charm and interest of scenery due to the progress of modern science. When he speaks of 'regions consecrate to oldest time,' he has a vague feeling that somehow his glens and mountains belonged to a hoary antiquity, such as could be claimed by none of the verdant plains around. Had he written half a century later he would have enjoyed a clearer perception of the vastness of that antiquity and of the long succession of events with which it was crowded.

It is curious to remember that three of the poets whom I have singled out as illustrations of the influence of our lowland, upland, and highland scenery upon our literature have held up the geologist to ridicule. Cowper put that votary of science into the pillory among the irreligious crowd, about whose ears the poet loved to 'crack the satiric thong.' Wordsworth treated the geological enthusiast with withering scorn. Scott, with characteristic good humour, only poked fun at him. It was reserved for a poet of our own day to look below the technical jargon of the schools, and to descry something of this wealth of new interest which the landscape derives from a knowledge of the history of its several parts. But Tennyson only entered a little way into this enlarged conception of nature. There remains a boundless field for some future poetic seer, who letting his vision pierce into the past, will set before the eyes of men the inner meaning of mountain and glen.

And thus, while we recognise the potent influence which the scenery of the country has exerted on the progress of our literature, we can look forward to a fresh extension of this influence as the outcome of geological investigation. Already the result of this widening of the outlook has made itself felt alike in prose and verse. The terrestrial revolutions of which each hill and dale is a witness; the contrasts presented between the present aspect and past history of every crag and peak; the slow, silent sculpturing that has carved out all this marvellous array of mountain-forms--appeal vividly to the imagination, and furnish themes that well deserve poetic treatment. That they will be seized upon by some Wordsworth of the future, I cannot doubt. The bond between landscape and literature will thus be drawn closer than ever. Men will be taught that beneath and behind all the outward beauty of our lowlands, our uplands, and our highlands there lies an inner history which, when revealed, will give to that beauty a fuller significance and an added charm.

FOOTNOTES:

Types of Scenery and Their Influence on Literature, the Romanes Lecture, delivered in the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford, June 1, 1898.

See the preceding essay for a fuller discussion of this part of the subject.

See p. 24.

The Task, bk. i. 154-176.

Ibid., i. 177.

The Task, iii. 357.

Ibid., iv. 246.

Ibid., vi. 112.

Winter, 8.

Summer, 192.

Ibid., 89.

Autumn, 476.

Spring, 381, 400, 402; Summer, 13.