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Riiser Larsen, to whom was confided the difficult task of navigating the vessel, steered her safely over an unknown course through fog and snow, and against violent head winds, and, although he had but fragmentary observations to guide him, was able to report to Amundsen and Ellsworth, forty-six hours after we left King's Bay, that Point Barrow on the coast of Alaska was in sight.

Colonel Nobile watched with tireless attention every manœuvre of the vessel and every movement of its complicated machinery. The result of the flight fully justified the wise provisions he had made for a winter journey. He had foreseen with remarkable prescience the very difficulties and dangers that we actually encountered. For example, had he not anticipated the possibility that ice from the propeller would be thrown against the side of the vessel, and strengthened the gas bags of that section of her hull to provide against this, we

should probably have been forced to land on the polar ice.

Wisting, the quartermaster of the Norge, had but four hours' sleep during our whole period in the air. Gottwaldt, Storm, and Johnsen, our radio operators, were almost continuously at their apparatus, taking meteorological observations and trying to pick up messages from wireless stations. As long as our antennæ and generators were free from ice we were in continuous touch with land stations and knew precisely where we were. The Italian members of our crew, Cecioni, Arduino, Caratti, Poella, and Allessandrini, - and also Omdal, were in almost constant attendance on our motors, utilizing the brief periods when they were off duty to assist in patching the vessel's skin.

Our provisions consisted of buttered bread, hard-boiled eggs, meat, and cake, all of which froze solid. Indeed, even the coffee and tea in our thermos flasks were cold.

NEW LIGHT ON WORDSWORTH1

BY J. L. GARVIN

LONG Since Professor de Selincourt put lovers of poetry in debt by his indispensable editions of Keats and Spenser. He now enriches the obligation past price by a book like a landmark not hereafter to be removed. For the study of English poetry in an age of rebirth, revelation of its dominant poetic genius in the morning of the romantic movement, this recovery of original docu

1 From the Observer (London Moderate Sunday paper), May 2

ments is easily the chief event of its kind in recent years. With the permission and help of Mr. Gordon Wordsworth, the poet's grandson, Mr. de Selincourt has investigated and collated all the manuscript copies of The Prelude. He solves the long-lingering mystery concerning a work marvelous in its imaginative passages and standing by itself in literature as an autobiography of the spirit. It was not issued until immediately after Words

worth's death at the age of eighty. For half his lifetime and more he had reserved it from the world.

Those who, like the present writer, own the first edition as published by Moxon in 1850 reckon it among their beloved possessions. There was reason to suspect from the beginning that when the prophet of Nature became a pillar of orthodoxy he tampered with the earlier record of his vehement youth and revolutionary fervors, and no less with his fresher style.

In our time suspicion became certainty. Now at last we have all the evidence, personal and literary. Professor de Selincourt prints on opposite pages the text as we have hitherto known it, and the poem as read to Coleridge at Coleorton over forty years before, about the end of 1806. The changes, suppressions, and late additions are shown. Alternative readings are given from the other manuscripts and fragmentary drafts. The introduction is a full account of the material and a thorough analysis of its meanings. At the end there is a long array of notes explaining the origin of particular passages and their relationand their relationship to Lake Country scenes. We notice only one small error. In the passage

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infinite pains have been devoted to a labor of exceeding love.

Let us take the personal problem first. Without this new self-given light upon it the literary question cannot be understood. What Wordsworth wrote of another was true of himself:

Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart;
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea,
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free.

The vision and faculty divine of his earlier genius, differing almost inexplicably from anything there had been in the world before, abide with us undimmed. After the war began we turned to him again - well for us had we continued when all other utterance failed. But the convention about Wordsworth as the ideal respectable man has long since been demolished. It was a colossal myth. By comparison with Byron, Shelley, Coleridge, even Keats, the author of 'Tintern Abbey,' 'Peel Castle,' and the rest of the lyrical miracles, the author of the sonnets next to Shakespeare's, or, as some think, above, was shown to the world as a moral monument representing some unique British secret of well-regulated conduct and safe opinions. Then Professor Émile Legouis discovered his youthful romance that he loved too well a lady in France, that they had the child Caroline, whose French descendants are still living, and that he behaved afterward much more like a cautious self-preserver than a gallant man. Professor Harper's biography of him showed that the earlier ardors of one who became the consecrated oracle of the higher kind of safe men had been those of a kindled revolutionary. He of all men was for a time antipatriot and pro-French.

What of it? At Orléans or Blois he met Annette Vallon, five years older than himself. He was not yet twenty

two. He was a very young and unprepared person in delirious circumstances. The atmosphere of France at the beginning of 1792 was enough to turn the head and bosom of any young islander exalted to the snows and stars by idealizing imagination but charged with repressed emotion and full of physical susceptibility. These things make him far more interesting as a human being and intelligible as a poet. We understand how he accumulated wisdom by a rapid intensity of enraptured and lacerating experiences. His practical control was never shaken again, and by degrees his poetic temperament attained serene sovereignty.

Driven back to England, as he says in his blank way, by 'want of funds,' he was indeed in dire poverty. Soon he knew himself the father of a French child and knew he ought to be the husband of a French woman. To a poet in the making these are considerable ideas. Naturally he was in violent love with France itself. In this situation the two countries went to war. That disaster he had never dreamed of anticipating. To him it was earthquake and devastation an inward convulsion such as he never knew before or after. He thought Pitt's policy wicked. He longed at first for the defeat of his own country. In the original version, as Mr. de Selincourt shows, he felt and wrote things that in these days would have earned him the name of proBoche or Bolshevik. He declared of an English Cabinet that they

Thirsted to make the Guardian Crook of Law A tool of Murder.

Giants in their impiety alone,

But, in their weapons and their warfare, base As vermin working out of reach, they leagu'd Their strength perfidiously to undermine Justice, and make an end of Liberty.

All this was toned down decorously in the poem as we have had it hitherto;

and Wordsworth, we find, fabricated much later in life the laudatory passage, 'Genius of Burke!' whom for reasons of love and politics alike he must have loathed as the archreactionary during the period described in the eleventh book of The Prelude. He learned more and more that Burke was an Isaiah in his splendor of warning and sense of futurity. Against aggressive and despotic France, Wordsworth becomes an indignant patriot and gradually a broad Conservative. Accordingly he, like Burke, has been called an apostate. It is a partisan imbecility. This "Tory Chartist' was in favor of popular education and county franchise for the rural laborer half a century before those reforms were granted. When his whole heart and intellect came back to his own country, his inspired sonnets uttered the soul of high patriotism and ordered liberty, and expressed the grandeur and pathos of historic tradition with an imaginative power and a moral glory that no poet of England or of any nation has excelled.

For the first time the original version on Professor de Selincourt's left-hand pages shows the intensity of the agony that swayed the young man torn between love and prudence, between his utter Englishness and his revolutionary enthusiasm, his passion for the country of the woman who ought to have been his wife and where a French child was his daughter. Nothing in the more flamboyant lives of Byron and Shelley matches this for romantic poignancy. But Wordsworth's psychology was astounding. Prudence conquered because the only alternative was the madness, to which he had been tempted for a moment, of renouncing his nation worse, his pays, his Lake District - and becoming a very bad Frenchman. He was no great lover, but a rapt sublime egotist, - 'Na

ture's Priest,'
a celibate of the imagination.

and even in marriage

So even to Professor Legouis, to whom we all owe an unpayable debt, Wordsworth seems touched with the famous insular hypocrisy when he describes the 'growth of a poet's mind,' and suppresses the love affair, though its influence on him was enormous. One amorous fever schooled his blood and judgment forever, yet exalted and clarified his whole nature and understanding. His disguised confession, 'Vaudracour and Julia,' you shall think as shambling and dodging as you please. Whether for art or life, it is a poor-spirited episode anyhow, and you cannot call it good. But one passage at least, now shown in its original setting, but afterward separated from that text, could have been written only by a man who, through Annette, had known how love comes like double revelation to imaginative minds:

he beheld

A vision, and adored the thing he saw.
Arabian fiction never filled the world
With half the wonders that were wrought for him.
Earth lived in one great presence of the spring.

At Orléans and Blois in that spring of 1792 there was a revolution in his head and another in his breast. But Annette, though she never could have known it, had a revenge that her good nature would not have desired, When Wordsworth comes to that point of autobiography where for the first time he must tamper awkwardly with the truth, and practise suppression or evasion by narrative both feigned and stilted, the latter half of his poem suffers profound injury. To the end there are splendid lines of natural description, but they are slender in proportion as argumentative stodginess increases. Never again does he touch that wonder of the fifth book, the owl-calling on the shores of Winder

mere, perhaps the only passage surpassing those repeated episodes of the first book, which still change forever the lives of some kinds of persons.

In all the greatest pages the two texts differ little. There are interesting variations, but on the whole the text as we have always known it is an improvement. There is one exception. The affair of the stolen boat on Ullswater, not Esthwaite, as hitherto supposed,-when the mountains rose higher in solemn rebuke the further he pulled out, is far fuller and better on the left-hand page than in the familiar version of 1850. As for The Prelude as a whole, we would not for the world have missed the knowledge of its earlier form. The later, on the whole, is superior; revision has been guided by sound critical judgment; but it is the judgment of an older, colder mind, and the left-hand text restores to us a thousand fresher and freer touches on word and phrase. To quote these would be a delightful but interminable task. We can take only one instance, the acute lines about the dropping acorn:

seeing nought, nought hearing, save When here and there about the grove of oaks Where was my bed, an acorn from the trees Fell audibly and with a startling sound.

But half seraph, half square-toes, Wordsworth was born. We all suspected that one notorious phrase was the perpetration of the older man returning to many Johnsonian correctitudes he had rejected in his youth. Not so. It is a man in the late twenties who can invoke Milton thus: 'O temperate Bard!' Mr. de Selincourt is rewarded for a meticulous toil guided throughout by enlightening insight. He has incalculably increased our understanding and delight in reading again what is both one of the great poems and one of the great autobiographies of the world.

BACON AFTER THREE HUNDRED YEARS1

BY HUGH B. C. POLLARD

APRIL marked the tercentenary of Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, Viscount St. Albans, 1561-1626. As a line in a diary it means little to the ordinary man; yet if we reflect a moment we find that in celebrating this date we are honoring the godfather of all modern science as we know it today. Francis Bacon was an enormous influence, a Napoleon of the battlefield of intellectual freedom. No man of his age presents a greater puzzle to historians, and there is a good deal of excuse for the theorists who hold the wildest beliefs about the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy. There was much that was hidden in the man, and the face which Bacon chose to show to the world was not the whole man. An eminent psychologist has dissected the psychical body of Leonardo da Vinci. Francis Bacon would be an even better subject for this kind of post-mortem, but it calls for rather more knowledge than pure psychology and for some little learning in sixteenth-century mysticism and the political limitations of the time.

Bacon was essentially the first of the moderns. He was an organizer, a compiler, an enormous centripetal force who focused the revolt of the times against the formalized schools of deductive Aristotelian logic. For the unquestioned authority and the petrified wisdom of the classics he substituted the line of thought we still call natural science. He dignified experiment and

1 From Discovery (London popular-science monthly), May

gave it a new standing as inductive logic. He was the first outstanding intellect in historic times to realize that the function of science was not to repeat the official quips of fossil thought, but to experiment, observe, and see what caused all sorts of things to happen. To-day this seems to us a perfectly reasonable logical idea which should have occurred to anybody.

We all owe so much to Francis Bacon that it is with difficulty that we get any true picture, not of the pageantry, but of the mentality of his time.

It is perhaps best to see Bacon as a man of to-day set by circumstance three hundred years before his time. Yet even this device is inadequate, for Francis Bacon had a greater grasp and a deeper knowledge of the spiritual values than is common among the rare philosophers of his calibre to-day.

It was an unsafe age in England. Rome then stood for foreign domination, for the dead hand of priestcraft on all who sought knowledge. Lutheranism was no better, and the extravagances of the Protestant sectaries were just as bad. There is no sanction for natural philosophy in either Testament, and the inquiring and rational mind was a dangerous thing for its owner in those not too distant days when the ashes of those martyred by both sides were barely cold.

New ideas were perilous ideas, and the greater part of Bacon's work had to be done in secret. In open history he stands out as an eminently sound adviser and a poor politician. He had

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