nary life; the characters and incidents were to be such as will be found in every village and its vicinity where there is a meditative and feeling mind to seek after them, or to notice them when they present themselves. In this idea originated the plan of the "Lyrical Ballads;" in which it was agreed that my endeavors should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for those shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself, as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonder of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.. Coleridge accordingly wrote the "Ancient Mariner" with a view to its insertion in a volume of poems composed upon this double principle, but it was eventu ally determined that Wordsworth's poems should be published by themselves, and they therefore appeared under the title of "Lyrical Ballads." To the second edition [says Coleridge] he added a preface of considerable length, in which, notwithstanding some passages of ap: parently a contrary import, he was understood to contend for the extension of this style to poetry of all kinds, and to reject as vicious and indefensible all phrases and forms of style that were not included in what he (unfortunately, I think, adopting an equivocal expression) called the language of real life. From this preface, prefixed to poems in which it was impossible to deny the presence of real genius, however mistaken its direction might be deemed, arose the whole long-continued controversy. For from the conjunction of perceived power with supposed heresy I explain the inveteracy, and in some instances, I grieve to say, the acrimonious passions, with which the controversy has been conducted by the assailants. 1 Here, then, is an announcement made on the very highest authority that “Lyrical Ballads" sounded the first note of the "new departure" which I have called the "liberal movement in English literature." It has been assumed in many quarters that my object in writing these papers is to make a vain and foolish attack on the poets who initiated the movement. I know not what I have said to justify such an assumption. My intention has been to examine historically, and, as far as I can, impartially, the meaning of the movement, its causes, and the effects it has produced on imaginative art. I suppose it will be gener ally allowed that liberalism in literature as well as in politics implied, in the last century at least, revolt; a revolt in the former case on behalf of individual liberty against certain canons of taste which were supposed by the critics of the day to have acquired an established authority. It does not follow that a conservative should hold such a revolt to have been unjustifiable. On the contrary, in all great creative artists the elements of liberalism and conservatism have ever been fairly compounded; they have been liberal by force of their imagination and invention, conservative by the restraint of their taste and judgment. Scott, with all his political Toryism and appreciative admiration for the writers of the eighteenth century, was a bold innovator in respect of form. Byron, a rebel against every kind of social the authority of the eighteenth century in convention, constantly and firmly upheld questions of criticism. Wordsworth appears to me to have been at once a great conservative and a great radical. man who is incapable of feeling enthusiastic admiration for his genius when it is doing itself justice has no right to criticise him at all; but when he is doing himself the most justice he is working in his own way on traditional lines; while, on the other hand, in his theory and in much of his practice he uncompromisingly defies tradition and experience. I shall attempt, in the present paper, to inquire how far his theory of poetry, which, as Coleridge says, so largely influenced the public taste, is in harmony with the fundamental principles of the art of poetry. If an apology be required for carrying the reader into the regions of abstract discussion, it must be remembered that Wordsworth and his followers defend their practice by reasoning, and that it is therefore incumbent on those who object to their practice to examine how far their reasoning is satisfactory. The In the first place, however, in order to test the character of Wordsworth's theory, it is important to recall the circumstances under which it was evolved. What roused him into rebellion against the canons of criticism generally accepted in his day, was undoubtedly the style of "poetical diction " then considered to be the indispensable dress of all true poetry. He The principal object, then, proposed in these from common life, and to relate or describe poems was to choose incidents and situations them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men, and at the same time to throw over them a certain coloring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect; and further and above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature: chiefly as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement. saw that the mode of expression employed | imagination to present objects to the by Darwin in his "Botanic Garden" was reader with a view of producing pleasure. widely admired; yet the coloring of this On this point it is best to let him speak poem appeared to him, as to most men of for himself. just and manly taste, to be false and gaudy. Looking back to the earlier poets of the century, he found that germs of the same diction were discoverable in them; as, for instance, in Pope's "Messiah," in some of Johnson's verses, and, indeed, in almost all the characteristic poems of the age. Instead of reasoning that the defect might spring from the natural corruption of some true principle of art, he inferred from his observations that it arose from a false ideal of composition, consciously adopted by the poets. And, as so often happens to men of a combative turn, his violent sentiments of dislike led him to argue that all true poetry must be composed on a system exactly opposite to the style which he condemned. Darwin seemed to withdraw himself deliberately from the common sympathies of humanity; true poetry, Wordsworth argued, should, therefore, look for its subjects in the objects and incidents of every-day life. Darwin's diction was artificial in the highest degree; it follows that the genuine language of poetry should resemble as closely as possible the language of the peasantry. Darwin wrote in a style which was the antithesis of prose; hence Words worth would have us believe that there is no essential difference between the lan guage of prose and verse, and that the fact of poems being written in metre is merely to be regarded as an accident of the art. In considering the justice of these views I suppose that everybody would be on Wordsworth's side as far as he was opposed to Darwin. Almost any species of verse writing, if it show sincere feeling, is better than a style inspired simply by pomposity and affectation. To enlarge the spiritual experience of an artificialized society by imaginative representations of the beauty of nature and common life was a just and noble aim for poetry, but it was not a new one. To take only a few examples which at once occur, Virgil had written the "Georgics," Thomson "The Seasons," Gray the "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," Goldsmith "The Deserted Village." All these were "subjects chosen from ordinary life," just as much as "Peter Bell," "The Idiot Boy," "Alice Fell," Beggars," or "The Sailor's Mother." The real innovation introduced by Wordsworth was one of poetical form, and lay in the manner in which he employed the Here we have a compendious statement of the radical difference between the practice of Wordsworth and that of preceding poets who had dealt with "subjects chosen from ordinary life." Neither Virgil, nor Thomson, nor Gray, nor Goldsmith, had attempted to present the objects they described "to the mind in an unusual aspect." They trusted to produce pleas ure by associating qualities inherent in these objects with other beautiful ideas, naturally connected with them, and expressed in a noble and harmonious form of verse. With them the subject matter of poetry lay in associations of ideas existing in their readers' imaginations equally with their own. With Wordsworth, on the other hand, all depended on the perception of the poet himself, and his power to displace and recombine the ordinary association of ideas so as to "present them to the mind in an unusual aspect." And, of course, if he had been able to produce great and permanent pleasure on the principles he lays down, all objection would have been silenced, and the only thing to be said would be that he had discovered principles of art which had hitherto been unknown or neglected. Fortunately Wordsworth's works comprise poems composed on the old principles as well as on his own, so that we are able to compare the two systems at work in the same mind, with the result, as I have already said, that his finest poetical effects are seen to be produced when he is most flagrantly violating his own rules. Comparing "Lucy Gray," for instance, which every one will admit to be a perfect work of art, with "The Idle Shepherds," which is one degree less successful, and, again, with "The Sailor's Mother" "Peter Bell," which are not successful at or all, it will be found that the pleasure excited arises from the simple association, in a beautiful metrical form, of objects that naturally affect the feelings, and that this pleasure diminishes in proportion as the poet intrudes his personality upon the reader, and endeavors to eke out the tenuity of his subject by analysis and reflec tion. In "Lucy Gray" the narrative is of the most direct kind; there is no sort of mental analysis employed; the exquisite charm of the workmanship comes from the simple description of pathetic objects, and the admirable and unexpected turns of the ballad style in which the story is told. In "The Idle Shepherd Boys " the real beauty of the poem consists in the delightful landscape presented to the imagination in the first three stanzas, particularly the third: Along the river's stony marge The sand-lark chants a joyous song; The thrush is busy in the wood, And carols loud and strong. A thousand lambs are on the rocks, Those boys with their green coronal; That plaintive cry which up the hill There is no analysis here; nothing but a musical combination of images that produce immediate pleasure in the mind and heart: such incidents as the narrative contains are redeemed from meanness only by falling in naturally with the beautiful pastoral scene called up before the imagination; and, even as it is, several stanzas are so prosaically expressed as to jar on the effect of the melodious opening. But take "The Sailor's Mother," and it will be seen that the occasional flatness of expression, which mars the completeness of "The Idle Shepherd Boys," prevails from the first line to the last with the exception perhaps of the second stanza. One morning (raw it was and wet, Not old, though something past her prime; The ancient spirit is not dead; When from these lofty thoughts I woke, Protected from the cold damp air?" "I had a son, who many a day main for me. "He to a fellow-lodger's care Had left it to be watched and fed, I found it when my son was dead; I suppose that there is scarcely any one largely acquainted with poetry who would not say, on first reading it, that there was an incongruity between the matter of this poem and the metrical form in which it is expressed. But, "Hold, hold!" we may imagine Wordsworth to reply; "you are wrong to judge in this way; for, if you think about the poem, you will see that the simple incident it records puts you upon a train of the most suggestive reflection respecting the unseen spiritual world and the nature of the affections. The imagination has, therefore, discharged its functions properly. As I say in Peter Bell,' another poem of the same kind: 6 The dragon's wing, the magic ring "And that the imagination has this creative power of 'conferring additional properties upon an object, or abstracting from it some of those which it actually Old times, thought I, are breathing there; possesses,' I can prove to you by the Proud was I that my country bred Such strength, a dignity so fair: She begged an alms like one in poor estate; language which poets use. For instance, take the use of the word 'hang'in poetry: *Preface to the edition of 1815. "In all these passages it is obvious that the quality of hanging does not really inhere in the object, but is conferred on it by the imagination, which I have, therefore, properly employed analytically, though in a different direction, to suggest a train of feeling connected with the incident of the sailor's mother. And as to your complaint that there is an incongruity between the nature of the thought and the mode of its expression, that arises from the false ideas of poetical diction which you have derived from your study of the poets. True, I might have said what I had to say in prose, but why should I be condemned for attempting to add to such description the charm which, by the consent of all nations, is acknowledged to exist in metri. cal language?""* To this, however, the reader may reply confidently: "Your reasoning, no doubt, is very fine and ingenious, but the matter is one not for argument but for perception. If the association of ideas is so strongly rooted in my mind that no exercise of your imagination is able to overcome the repugnance I feel at finding a subject which seems to me naturally prosaic treated in metre; while, on the other hand, you are often able to produce the highest pleasure in my mind by your metrical treatment of more imaginative subjects; and if, besides, this latter is evidently the way in which all great standard poets produce pleasure, is it not possible that on this occasion you have been employing your imagination improperly?" Words worth seems to have thought that a poet could always write poetically by the mere exercise of his will. But the evidence of the greatest creative poetry proves that the imagination must, in the first place, be overmastered and possessed by an impulse from without, and Scott describes universal experience in the following pas sage of one of his letters: Nobody knows that has not tried the feverish trade of poetry, how much it depends upon mood and whim: I don't wonder that in dis missing all the other deities of Paganism the Muse should have been retained by common consent, for, in sober reality, writing good verses seems to depend upon something separate from the volition of the author. I sometimes think my fingers set up for themselves, independent of my head; for twenty times I have begun a thing on a certain plan, and never in my life adhered to it (in a work of imagination, that is) for half an hour together. 66 " or 66 This is a vivid description of the working of the "estro afflatus," without which Byron so often declares in his let ters that he cannot write well in metre; of that "Eros" which, Plato tells us in the Symposium," seizes and inflames the imagination of the poet. Nor is it the first act of poetical conception alone which is performed in this manner; in all the imag inative arts the form of the work produced is largely determined by fortune and in of the painters preserved at Florence, a spiration. I remember among the studies rough design of (I think) Parmigianino, in which the artist, desiring to represent the image of terror on a man's face, has left on the paper three or four unsuccessful attempts, showing that he only attained idea that he had conceived. Milton, we by degrees the expression of the exact adise Lost" into the form of a drama. know, had originally resolved to cast" ParNor can anything be more suggestive than the account which Lockhart gives of the growth of "The Lay of the Last Min strel: " Sir John Stoddart's casual recitation, a year or two before, of Coleridge's unpublished "Christabel," had fixed the music of that noble fragment in his memory; and it occurs to him that by throwing the story of Gilpin Horner into somewhat of a similar cadence, metrical romance as would serve to connect he might produce such an echo of the later his "Conclusion" of the primitive Sir Tristram with his imitations of the popular ballad in "The Grey Brother" and "Eve of St. John." A single scene of feudal festivity in the hall of Branksome, disturbed by some pranks of a nondescript goblin, was probably all that he contemplated; but his accidental confinement in the midst of a volunteer camp gave him leisure to meditate his theme to the sound of a bugle; and suddenly there flashes on him the idea of extending his simple outline, so as to embrace a vivid panorama of that old border life of war and tumult, and all earnest passions, with which his researches on the "Minstrelsy had by degrees fed his imagination, until every the minutest feature had been taken home and realized with unconscious intenseness of sym I have endeavored in the above passage to con-pathy; so that he had won for himself in the dense the argument of Wordsworth's prefaces to the past another world, hardly less complete or editions of his poems published in 1805 and 1815. familiar than the present. Erskine of Crans toun suggests that he would do well to divide | adapted. Even in pathetic narrative the poem into cantos, and prefix to each of poems like "Michael," the prosy effect is them a motto explanatory of the action, after often reproduced. the fashion of Spenser in "The Faery Queen." He pauses for a moment, and the happiest conception of the framework of a picturesque narrative that ever occurred to any poet- -one that Homer might have envied the creation of the ancient harper starts to life. By such steps did "The Lay of the Last Minstrel " grow out of the "Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border." When the imagination is in this exhilarating atmosphere, as it requires some larger and bolder means of expression than is afforded to it by prose, it seizes on metre as naturally as a bird takes to the air, and employs the vivid metaphorical forms of language which led Wordsworth into his fallacious views about its methods of analysis and transmutation. Unless a man's imagination is inspired from without, and his design is conceived when the mind is in that excited state, he will do wrong to choose metre as his instrument of expression. Hence it is that so much of Wordsworth's verse seems to be written in violation of the laws of poetical art. In "The Excursion," for instance, though it is full of the most noble incidental passages, evidently written under the influence of direct inspiration, yet, as the design of the whole poem is certainly formed by a process of cool meditation, we are constantly haunted by a sense that we are in an atmosphere unfavorable to the movement of metre. I have opened "The Excursion" at random, and I light at once on the following passage:· To an exalted pitch (the self-same cause It is plain that these thoughts would be much more fittingly expressed in prose than they are in verse. Nor is this simply because the substance of them is philosophical and didactic, for so is the substance of the "Essay on Man," and yet the thought in the "Essay on Man" is (for the reason given by Pope, and quoted in my last paper) expressed better in metre than it could be in prose. The reason is, as every one can see, that the writer of the above passage is not in a mood for the expression of thoughts for which metre is Excursion, book iii. A good report did from their kinsman come "The prettiest letters that were ever seen. the sea There is a Yew-Tree, pride of Lorton Vale, |