A. D. Martin, The Religion of Wordsworth

A. D. Martin, The Religion of Wordsworth, George Allen & Unwin Ltd, London, 1936.

Twenty years later he would have hesitated to speak so disparagingly of dogma, nor can we reasonably approve his contempt, for dogma is the considered opinion of a multitude of persons (Martin 11)

“n those earlier days when Wordsworth planned the great work he never accomplished, but for which The Prelude, The Excursion, and The Recluse are parts awaiting assemblance, his position in regard to organized Religion was one of indifference, perhaps even of hostility. Until middle life he seldom attended Christian worship. I do not think he read the Bible deeply or extensively (79-80)

“Jehovah—with his thunder, and the choir/Of shouting Angels, and the empyreal thrones—/I pass them unalarmed” [The Recluse]… I am quite sure that at that time Wordsworth knew very little of ‘Jehovah and the choir of shouting Angels.’ For no one accustomed to Hebrew Religion from within would fail to feel its profound and moral sense of awe for that Deity whose very name might seldom be spoken. (80)

…we should not be disappointed in finding that Wordsworth’s early individualism in religion did not stand the strain of circumstance. Lasting peace is always more readily found through the expression of our inner life conjointly with our fellows. We cannot afford to plough lonely furrows. Our life draws its richest sustenance when it combines an individual with a communal apprehension of God. If there is something pathetic in Wordsworth’s turning at last to his wife’s simple-minded piety for support, as his own inner light faded, there is in this new attitude an instinctive wisdom, the beginning of a recognition that Religion safeguards our humility best when it shows us that stored up is history, in liturgy, in the priestliness of saints, is the food we need for real amplitude of the soul. Here lies the significance of The Ecclesiastical Sonnets…they are evidence of an actual broadening of his sympathies, his growth in personality, as compared with the days when he wrote much better poetry. (Martin)

…the external conditions of his life grew easier…If in such things as these the springs of satisfaction are ever found he should have been happy. But who can think of them so? The mystery of Life and Death haunts every reflective being. What man grows old and is content with a blank mind about the final event in time for him, coming, it may be next week, and most surely within a year or two? Only the abnormal, the morally undeveloped, the imbecile. (81)

The change from what he wrote when twenty-three years of age to the verdict of his seventy-third year represents fifty years of experience, and that in politics seventy-three counts for much, twenty-three for very little. (Martin 40)

The tremendous importance of this new way of quest lay in its opening to him an aspect of life he had never sufficiently considered. In the Areopagitica Milton describes with just scorn the man who, not wishing to be troubled about Religion finds “some divine note and estimation to whose care and credit he may commit the whole managing of his religious affairs”… It was the distinctive glory of Puritanism generally that it knew real religion must be an individual apprehension of God…Hence came that strong, almost boastful assertion in The Recluse which brushed aside Jehovah and his shouting Angels, to find in “the individual mind”…the one authentic source of Truth.

A person who needs to go up to a five-barred gate and push it hard in order to convince himself that there is any reality outside his own mind…is not an ideal man, because his spirit too greatly overflows his body and swamps, so to speak, the body’s contribution to thought. For there are such contributions. Rodin’s famous statue The Thinker, the nude figure of a man of huge muscular development sitting in a brooding attitude, may be an exaggeration, but as a symbol it is true. Every thought of the mind is accompanied by a change in the body. (85)