of many modern writers. Readers accustomed to such style would, doubtless, they said, 'enquire by what species of courtesy these attempts can be permitted to assume' the name of poetry. The answer was do they contain a natural delineation of human passion, human characters, and human incidents' ? If so, it is the readers who are at fault; they should consent to be pleased in spite of that most dreadful enemy to our pleasures, our own pre-established codes of decision'.

In this Preface is the pith of the whole argument. The rest of Wordsworth's critical essays is little more, in effect, than an expansion of these remarks from the Advertisement to Lyrical Ballads. The 'language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society', in its relation to poetic pleasure, became the excursus on poetic diction. The natural delineation of human passions', etc., became the essay on poetry as observation and description; and our pre-established codes of decision' were attacked, at considerable length, and with a high degree of skill, in these and the remaining papers. It sounds more serious than it is, for its main interest to-day is not literary, but personal. English literature would probably have sown the barren fields of eighteenth-century thought, even if Wordsworth had left these elaborate essays unwritten. They were required for his personal satisfaction, for the tranquillization and reconcilement of his own psychological being. He, too, had sinned with the Pharisees, and he repented in sackcloth and ashes, seeking those

symbols of atonement from the homes of the middle and lower classes'. Confession is good for the soul, even artistic confession for the erring psychologist, and Wordsworth sought, by open recantation, to restore to an exhausted world the depredations of William Godwin and his votaries.

For the author of Political Justice would have stripped human life bare of all its amenities and variety. 'His system', as Mr. Hutchinson writes, 'represented the eighteenth-century cult of reason carried to the pitch of fetish-worship. The mind must be scoured and smooth-rubbed and stripped of all habitudes whatsoever, be they instincts, natural affections, sentiments, prejudices, or principles. There must have taken place, in the man, a complete dissolution of all that we understand by the words moral character, before Godwin will allow him to be reckoned one of the emancipated'; and from this 'servitude to freedom's name' Wordsworth, painfully reconstructing his faith shattered in France, sang men free. In the mood of Godwinian reason he had written his tragedy The Borderers (1795–96), and his revulsion from those standards to the wider democratic ideal of The Excursion, 1814, is traced in considerable detail by Professor Émile Legouis in his wholly admirable study, La Jeunesse de Wordsworth: 'il serait aisé', he declares, 'de poursuivre cette étude, et de montrer Wordsworth reconstruisant un à un, par l'observation des humbles, les sentiments dont Godwin avait dépouillé l'homme idéal' (p. 316).

The
Prelude

and The

ii.

6

Reviewed in this light, accordingly, Wordsworth's literary criticism, as such, apart from the occasional Prefaces. interest of his judgments and opinions, is the prose version of the poem, in which, in thirteen books, under the title of The Prelude, he traced the growth of a poet's mind'. This work, written at different times between 1799 and 1805, was not published till 1850, the year of the poet's death. His revision of the manuscript was continued till at least as late as 1832. It was intended to form an introduction to The Recluse in three Parts, of which only The Excursion, designed as Part II, is complete, and thus to become, as Wordsworth called it, the ante-chapel' to his 'Gothic Church'. In a sense, it was a kind of invocation-prolonged and peculiarly conscientious-not of visionary muses, but of the powers and faculties of the poet who desired to employ them to great ends. Meanwhile, his examination of those faculties involved a theory of poetics. The poet who was to dare to sing

Of Truth, and Grandeur, Beauty, Love, and Hope,
And melancholy Fear subdued by Faith;

Of blessed consolations in distress;

Of moral strength and intellectual power;
Of joy in widest commonalty spread;

who was to recover for an age self-blinded by its own
knowledge, the fabled happiness of Elysian fields—

For the discerning intellect of Man,

When wedded to this goodly universe

who,

In love and holy passion, shall find these
A simple produce of the common day;—

long before the blissful hour arrives,

Would chaunt, in lonely place, the spousal verse
Of this great consummation,-

such a poet, such an interpreter, must plainly test to the utmost, not merely the faculties of his mind, but the mechanical implements which he employed. Hence The Prelude, in its thirteen books, of the growth of a poet's mind; and hence, equally, the prefaces from 1798 to 1815, with their plethoric defence of the choice of incidents from common life' and the 'selection of language really used by men'.

sensation

It is all written in the poems, for those who have the Poetic wit to read. Take this reprint of the volume of 1798, alism. designed expressly as an experiment, and consider in the light of these conclusions some passages from Wordsworth's contributions. There is, first, the right use of landscape, and the moral power of beauty:

These forms of beauty have not been to me,
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart,
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration:-feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure; such, perhaps,
As may have had no trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life;
His little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love.

The so-called sensational school of fiction-Mrs. Radcliffe and her friends-had followed the wrong road. These resolute disciples of Rousseau had affected to treat the sublime as a kind of patent medicine,-so many mountains to heal the wounds of so much misfortune. Wordsworth tested the theory of the principle. The forms of beauty were to pass into the mind, and to issue by chemical changes in acts of good conduct. They were to be felt in the blood' and along the heart', availing, in changed surroundings, and when their actual features were forgotten, to purify the springs of action. The efficacy of scenery was not its forms, as the efficacy of education is not its facts. The value of each resides in its power to mould character. If the senses are exercised on right objects, then 'emotion remembered in tranquillity' will make every man a poet in soul. These sensational stimuli are all around us, if we have but the seeing eye; Otranto and Udolpho are no wiser than the hills and dales of our own land. Nor is it only our imperception which is at fault; our doctrine of values is even more to blame. We have been taught and wrought upon to despise what is honourable, and to neglect what is noteworthy. So, the slighted is to be restored to greatness, and the unremembered to memory; the victims of the vast proscription are to be summoned from their nameless graves. And the repaired operation of the senses will lead to deeper delights, disused by the smoothrubbed soul: