Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/714

672 W O E D S W B T H Wordsworth was far from repudiating elevation of style in poetry. " If," he said, " the poet s subject be judici ously chosen, it will naturally, and upon fit occasion, lead him to passions the language of which, if selected truly and judiciously, must necessarily be dignified and varie gated, and alive with metaphors and figures." But no "foreign splendours" should be interwoven with what " the passion naturally suggests," and " where the passions are of a milder character the style also should be subdued and temperate." Such was Wordsworth s theory of poetic diction. Nothing could be more grossly mistaken than the current notion, which has been repeated by so many critics of authority that it has become an established belief, that the greater part of Wordsworth s poetry was composed in defiance of his own theory, and that he succeeded best when he set his own theory most at defiance. All com mentators on Wordsworth who feel tempted to repeat this pretty paradox should pause and read his own state ment of his theory before giving further currency to a misconception which they will see is absurdly unwarrant able. It is traceable to the authority of Coleridge. His just, sympathetic, and penetrating criticism on Words worth s work as a poet did immense service in securing for him a wider recognition ; but his proved friendship and brilliant style have done sad injustice to the poet as a theorist. It was natural to assume that Coleridge, if anybody, must have known what his friend s theory was ; and it was natural also that readers under the charm of his lucid and melodious prose should gladly grant themselves a dispensation from the trouble of verifying his facts in the harsh and cumbrous exposition of the theorist himself. 1 After all, the theory is a minor affair. It is the work that counts ; only it is hardly fair to Wordsworth that he should go down as a stupid genius who did right against his own reasoned principles, or an arrogant person who knew himself to be wrong but refused to admit it. The question of diction made most noise, but it was far from being the most important point of poetic doctrine set forth in the Preface. If in this he merely enunciated a truism, generally admitted in words but too generally ignored in practice, there was real novelty in his plea for humble subjects, and in his theory of poetic composition. We might, indeed, easily exaggerate to ourselves the amount of innovation in mere abstract theory; this might have been insignificant enough but for the turn that was given to it by the poet s individuality. But in view of 1 So deeply rooted is the misconception that even Mr Myers, after quoting the Preface itself, and the famous stanza "Perhaps some dungeon hears thee groan," &c., from The Affliction of Margaret, com ments as follows: "These lines, supposed to be spoken by a poor widow at Penrith, afford a fair illustration of what Wordsworth calls the language really spoken by men, with metre superadded. What other distinction from prose, he asks, would we have ? We may answer that we would have what he has actually given us, viz. , an appropriate and attractive music, lying both in the rhythm and the actual sound of the words used." But in the theory this is covered by the phrases metrical arrangement and selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation, dignified and variegated and alive with metaphors and figures. Wordsworth was not an adroit expositor in prose, and he did not make his qualifications sufficiently prominent, but the theory of diction taken with those qualifications left him free without inconsistency to use any language that was not contrary to "true taste and feeling." He acknowledged that he might occasionally have substituted "particular for general associ ations," and that thus language charged with poetic feeling to himself might appear trivial and ridiculous to others, as in The Idiot Boy and Goody Make ; he even went so far as to withdraw Alice Fell, first published in 1807, from several subsequent editions ; but he argued that it was dangerous for a poet to make alterations on the simple authority of a few individuals or even classes of men, because if he did not follow his own judgment and feelings his mind would infallibly be debilitated. all that was most distinctive and influential in Words worth s own work, his remarks on poetry in general, on the supreme function of the imagination in dignifying i humble and commonplace incidents, and on the need of active exercise of imagination in the reader as well as in the poet -passiveness in this particular not being recom mended as wise his remarks on these points are im measurably more important than his theory of poetic diction. It is much to be regretted that Coleridge s genius for luminous and brilliant exposition was not applied to the development of the few stiff phrases in which Wordsworth sought to generalize his own practice. Such sayings as that poetry " takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity," or that it is the business of a poet to trace "how men associate ideas in a state of excitement," are, like the detached parts of a Chinese puzzle, meaningless till they are pieced together with views of the poet s art expressed and illustrated elsewhere. They are significant of Words worth s endeavour to lay the foundations of his art in an independent study of the feelings and faculties of men in real life, unbiassed as far as possible by poetic custom and convention. If this had meant, as many might suppose from the bare statement of the idea, that the new poet was to turn his back on his pre decessors and never look behind him to what they had done, was to reject absolutely as valueless for him the accumulating tradition of thought and expression, was to write in short as if nobody before him had ever written a line, even going to common speech for his diction, a more foolish and unfruitful, silly and presumptuous, ambition could not be conceived. But Wordsworth was guilty of no such extravagance. He was from boyhood upwards a diligent student of poetry, and was not insensible of his obligations to the past. His purpose was only to use real life as a touchstone of poetic substance. Imagination operates in all men for the increase or the abatement of emotion. Incidents that have lodged in the memory are not allowed to lie there unchanged ; joy is sustained by the instinctive activity of the imagination in assembling kindred ideas round the original incident, and under the instinctive operation of the same faculty pain is relieved by the suggestion of ideas that console and tranquillize. Now the poet, in Wordsworth s conception, is distinctively a man in whom this beneficent energy of imagination, operative as a blind instinct more or less in all men, is stronger than in others, and is voluntarily and rationally exercised for the benefit of all in its proper work of increase and consolation. If the poet is to discharge this mission profitably, he must study how the imagination works in real life, that is to say, "how men associate ideas in a stateof excitement." Not every image that the excited mind conjures up in real life is necessarily poetical. Joy may be chilled and pain exaggerated by morbid imaginative activity. It is the business of the poet to select and modify for his special purpose of producing immediate pleasure. "Nor," says the ardent theorist, " let this necessity of producing immediate pleasure be considered as a degradation of the poet s art. It is far otherwise. It is an acknowledgment of the beauty of the universe, an acknowledgment the more sincere because it is not formal but indirect ; it is a task light and easy to him who looks at the world in the spirit of love ; further, it is a homage paid to the native and naked dignity of man, to the grand elementary principle of pleasure, by which he knows and feels and moves." All this is elementary enough as Hartleian psychology. The formal recognition of it will not make a man a poet.

But there were several respects in which the formal