Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/712

670 WORDSWORTH dialectic. The radiant restless vitality of the more vari ously gifted man stirred the stiffer and more sluggish nature of the recluse to its depths, and Coleridge s quick and generous appreciation of his power gave him precisely the encouragement that he needed. The Lyrical Ballads were the poetic fruits of their com panionship. Out of their frequent discussions of the relative value of common life and supernatural incidents as themes for imaginative treatment grew the idea of writing a volume together, composed of poems of the two kinds. Coleridge was to take the supernatural ; and, as his industry was not equal to his friend s, this kind was represented by the Ancient Mariner alone. Among Wordsworth s contributions were The Female Vagrant, We are Seven, Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman, The Last of the Flock, The Idiot Boy, The Mad Mother (" Her eyes are wild "), The Thorn, Goody Blake and Harry Gill, The Reverie of Poor Susan, Simon Lee, Ex postulation and Reply, The Tables Turned, Lines left iipon a Yew-tree Seat, An Old Man Travelling (" Animal Tran quillity and Decay "), Lines above Tintern Abbey. The volume was published by Cottle of Bristol in September, 1798. It is necessary to enumerate the contents of this volume in fairness to the contemporaries of Wordsworth, whom it is the fashion to reproach for their cold or scoffing recep tion of his first distinctive work. Those Wordsworthians who give up The Idiot Boy, Goody Blake, and The Thorn as mistaken experiments have no right to triumph over the first derisive critics of the Lyrical Ballads, or to wonder at the dulness that failed to see at once in this humble issue from an obscure provincial press the advent of a great master in literature. The poems that have not yet won general acceptance even among the most devoted Wordsworthians formed a large part of the whole revela tion, and attention was specially drawn to them by the title. While the taste for The Idiot Boy is still uncreated, still far from general, while critics of authority can still so completely miss the poet s intention as to suggest that the poem might have been enjoyable if Betty Foy s im becile son had been described as beautiful and the word " idiot " had not been left to convey uncorrected its repul sive associations, while intimate disciples acknowledge themselves unable to understand the " glee " with which Wordsworth told the simple story, and wonder whether he intended it as a " comic poem," 1 it may be doubted whether now, after nearly a century of discipleship and exposition, the Lyrical Ballads would receive a much more cordial or much wider welcome than they did in 1798. It is true that Tintern Abbey was in the volume, and that all the highest qualities of Wordsworth s imagination and of his verse could be illustrated now from the lyrical ballads proper in this first publication ; but before we accuse our predecessors of purblindness, corrupt taste, and critical malignity, as is the sweet and reasonable custom of too 1 The defect of The Idiot Roy is really rhetorical, rather than poetic. Wordsworth himself said that "he never wrote anything with so much glee," and, once the source of his glee is felt in the nobly affectionate relations between the two half-witted irrational old women and the glorious imbecile, the work is seen to be executed with a harmony that should satisfy the most exacting criticism. The poet not only felt but gave complete expression to the most exquisitely tender humour in telling the story of the simple incident. Poetically, there fore, the poem is a success ; not a note is Out of tune, with the excep tion perhaps of the boisterous ridicule of the romantic ballad in his speculations as to the employment of the lost horseman ; otherwise, as a work of art in a rare vein of humorous tenderness elevated by the moral dignity of the subject, The Idiot Boy is as perfect as any thing that Wordsworth wrote. But rhetorically this particular attempt to "breathe grandeur upon the very humblest face of human life" must be pronounced a failure, inasmuch as the writer did not use sufficiently forcible means to disabuse his readers of vulgar pre possessions. many professing Wordsworthians, 2 we should remember that clear vision is easier for us than it was for them when the revelation was fragmentary and incomplete. Although Wordsworth was not received at first with the respect to which we now see that he was entitled, his power was not entirely without recognition. There is a curious commercial evidence of this, which ought to be noted, because a perversion of the fact is sometimes used to exaggerate the supposed neglect of Wordsworth at the outset of his career. When the Longmans took over Cottle s publishing business in 1799, the value of the copyright of the Lyrical Ballads, for which Cottle had paid thirty guineas, was assessed at nil. Cottle therefore begged that it might be excluded altogether from the bargain, and presented it to the authors. But in 1800, when the first edition was exhausted, the Longmans offered Wordsworth =100 for two issues of a new edition with an additional volume and an explanatory preface. The sum was small compared with what Scott and Byron soon afterwards received, but it shows that the public neglect was not quite so complete as is sometimes represented. Another edition was called for in 1802, and a fourth in 1805. The new volume in the 1800 edition was made up of poems composed during his residence at Goslar in the winter of 1798-99, and after his settlement at Grasmere in December 1799. It contained a large portion of poems now universally accepted : Ruth, Nutting, Three Years She Grew, A Poet s Epitaph, Hartleap Well, Lucy Gray, The Brothers, Michael, The Old Cumberland Beggar, Poems on the Naming of Places. But it contained also the famous Preface, in which he infuriated critics by presuming to defend his eccentricities in an elaborate theory of poetry and poetic diction. Comparatively few in the present day have actually read and studied this famous document, although it is con stantly referred to as a sort of revolutionary proclamation against the established taste of the eighteenth century. For one that has read Wordsworth s original, hundreds have read Coleridge s brilliant criticism, and the fixed con ception of the doctrines actually put forth by Wordsworth is taken from this. Now, although the Preface and the ex tensive and bitter discussion provoked by it had not a tithe of the influence on poetry ascribed to it by a natural liking for sudden changes and simple personal agencies, although the result on literary practice was little more than the banishment of a few overdriven phrases and figures of speech from poetic diction, 3 it is desirable, considering the celebrity of the affair, that Wordsworth s exact position should be made clear. To do this is to contradict several "vulgar errors" on the subject, probably too vulgar and deeply rooted to be affected by any exposure. Coleridge s criticism of his friend s theory proceeded avowedly "on the assumption that his words had been rightly interpreted, as purporting that the proper diction for poetry in general consists altogether in a language taken, with due excep tions, from the mouths of men in real life, a language which actually constitutes the natural conversation of men under the influence of natural feelings." Coleridge assumed further that, when Wordsworth spoke of there being "no essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition," he meant by language not the mere words but the style, the structure, and the order of the sentences ; on this assumption he argued as if Words worth had held that the metrical order should always be the same as the prose order. Given these assumptions, which formed the popular interpretation of the theory 2 Herein curiously, if not ridiculously, inconsistent, as their master was not, with his tranquillizing creed. 3 Sir Henry Taylor, one of the most acute and judicious of Words

worth s champions, came to this conclusion in 1834.