CHILDREN--LIFE AT RYDAL MOUNT--"THE EXCURSION."
It may be well at this point to return to the quiet chronicle of the
poet's life at Grasmere; where his cottage was becoming too small
for an increasing family. His eldest son, John, was born in 1803;
his eldest daughter, Dorothy or Dora, in 1804. Then came Thomas, born
1806; and Catherine, born 1808; and the list is ended by William,
born 1810, and now (1880) the only survivor. In the spring of 1808
Wordsworth left Townend for Allan Bank,--a more roomy, but an
uncomfortable house, at the north end of Grasmere. From thence he
removed for a time, in 1811, to the Parsonage at Grasmere.
Wordsworth was the most affectionate of fathers, and allusions to
his children occur frequently in his poetry. Dora--who was the
delight of his later years--has been described at length in _The
Triad_. Shorter and simpler, but more completely successful, is the
picture of Catherine in the little poem which begins "Loving she is,
and tractable, though wild," with its homely simile for childhood--
its own existence sufficient to fill it with gladness:
As a faggot sparkles on the hearth
Not less if unattended and alone
Than when both young and old sit gathered round
And take delight in its activity.
The next notice of this beloved child is in the sonnet, "Surprised
by joy, impatient as the wind," written when she had already been
removed from his side. She died in 1812, and was closely followed by
her brother Thomas. Wordsworth's grief for these children was
profound, violent, and lasting, to an extent which those who imagine
him as not only calm but passionless might have some difficulty in
believing. "Referring once," says his friend Mr. Aubrey de Vere,
"to two young children of his who had died about _forty years_
previously, he described the details of their illnesses with an
exactness and an impetuosity of troubled excitement, such as might
have been expected if the bereavement had taken place but a few
weeks before. The lapse of time seemed to have left the sorrow
submerged indeed, but still in all its first freshness. Yet I
afterwards heard that at the time of the illness, at least in the
case of one of the two children, it was impossible to rouse his
attention to the danger. He chanced to be then under the immediate
spell of one of those fits of poetic inspiration which descended on
him like a cloud. Till the cloud had drifted, he could see nothing
beyond."
This anecdote illustrates the fact, which to those who knew
Wordsworth well was sufficiently obvious, that the characteristic
calm of his writings was the result of no coldness of temperament
but of a deliberate philosophy. The pregnant force of his language
in dealing with those dearest to him--his wife, his sister, his
brother--is proof enough of this. The frequent allusions in his
correspondence to the physical exhaustion brought on by the act of
poetical composition indicate a frame which, though made robust by
exercise and temperance, was by nature excitable rather than strong.
And even in the direction in which we should least have expected it,
there is reason to believe that there were capacities of feeling in
him which never broke from his control. "Had I been a writer of
love-poetry," he is reported to have said, "it would have been
natural to me to write it with a degree of warmth which could hardly
have been approved by my principles, and which might have been
undesirable for the reader."
Wordsworth's paternal feelings, at any rate, were, as has been said,
exceptionally strong; and the impossibility of remaining in a house
filled with sorrowful memories rendered him doubly anxious to obtain
a permanent home. "The house which I have for some time occupied," he
writes to Lord Lonsdale, in January 1813, "is the Parsonage of
Grasmere. It stands close by the churchyard, and I have found it
absolutely necessary that we should quit a place which, by recalling
to our minds at every moment the losses we have sustained in the
course of the last year, would grievously retard our progress
towards that tranquillity which it is our duty to aim at." It
happened that Rydal Mount became vacant at this moment, and in the
spring of 1813 the Wordsworths migrated to this their favourite and
last abode.
Rydal Mount has probably been oftener described than any other
English poet's home since Shakespeare; and few homes, certainly,
have been moulded into such close accordance with their inmates'
nature. The house, which has been altered since Wordsworth's day,
stands looking southward, on the rocky side of Nab Scar, above Rydal
Lake. The garden was described by Bishop Wordsworth immediately
after his uncle's death, while every terrace-walk and flowering
alley spoke of the poet's loving care. He tells of the "tall ash-tree,
in which a thrush has sung, for hours together, during many years;"
of the "laburnum in which the osier cage of the doves was hung;" of
the stone steps "in the interstices of which grow the yellow
flowering poppy, and the wild geranium or Poor Robin,"--
Gay
With his red stalks upon a sunny day.
And then of the terraces--one levelled for Miss Fenwick's use, and
welcome to himself in aged years; and one ascending, and leading to
the "far terrace" on the mountain's side, where the poet was wont to
murmur his verses as they came. Within the house were disposed his
simple treasures: the ancestral almery, on which the names of unknown
Wordsworths may be deciphered still; Sir George Beaumont's pictures
of "The White Doe of Rylstone" and "The Thorn," and the cuckoo clock
which brought vernal thoughts to cheer the sleepless bed of age, and
which sounded its noonday summons when his spirit fled.
Wordsworth's worldly fortunes, as if by some benignant guardianship
of Providence, were at all times proportioned to his successive needs.
About the date of his removal to Rydal (in March 1813) he was
appointed, through Lord Lonsdale's interest, to the distributorship
of stamps for the county of Westmoreland, to which office the same
post for Cumberland was afterwards added. He held this post till
August 1842, when he resigned it without a retiring pension, and it
was conferred on his second son. He was allowed to reside at Rydal,
which was counted as a suburb of Ambleside: and as the duties of the
place were light, and mainly performed by a most competent and
devoted clerk, there was no drawback to the advantage of an increase
of income which released him from anxiety as to the future. A more
lucrative office--the collectorship of Whitehaven--was subsequently
offered to him; but he declined it, "nor would exchange his Sabine
valley for riches and a load of care."
Though Wordsworth's life at Rydal was a retired one, it was not
that of a recluse. As years went on he became more and more
recognized as a centre of spiritual strength and illumination, and
was sought not only by those who were already his neighbours, but by
some who became so mainly for his sake. Southey at Keswick was a
valued friend, though Wordsworth did not greatly esteem him as a poet.
De Quincey, originally attracted to the district by admiration for
Wordsworth, remained there for many years, and poured forth a
criticism strangely compounded of the utterances of the
hero-worshipper and the _valet-de-chambre_. Professor Wilson, of the
_Noctes Ambrosianae_, never showed, perhaps, to so much advantage
as when he walked by the side of the master whose greatness he was
one of the first to detect. Dr. Arnold of Rugby made the
neighbouring home at Fox How a focus of warm affections and of
intellectual life. And Hartley Coleridge, whose fairy childhood had
inspired one of Wordsworth's happiest pieces, continued to lead
among the dales of Westmoreland a life which showed how much of
genius and goodness a single weakness can nullify.
Other friends there were, too, less known to fame, but of
exceptional powers of appreciation and sympathy. The names of
Mrs. Fletcher and her daughters, Lady Richardson and Mrs. Davy,
should not be omitted in any record of the poet's life at Rydal. And
many humbler neighbours may be recognized in the characters of the
_Excursion_ and other poems. _The Wanderer_, indeed, is a picture
of Wordsworth himself--"an idea," as he says, "of what I fancied my
own character might have become in his circumstances." But the
_Solitary_ was suggested by a broken man who took refuge in
Grasmere from the world in which he had found no peace; and the
characters described as lying in the churchyard among the mountains
are almost all of them portraits. The clergyman and his family
described in Book VII were among the poet's principal associates in
the vale of Grasmere. "There was much talent in the family," says
Wordsworth in the memoranda dictated to Miss Fenwick; "and the
eldest son was distinguished for poetical talent, of which a
specimen is given in my Notes to the _Sonnets on the Duddon_. Once
when, in our cottage at Townend, I was talking with him about poetry,
in the course of our conversation I presumed to find fault with the
versification of Pope, of whom he was an enthusiastic admirer. He
defended him with a warmth that indicated much irritation;
nevertheless I could not abandon my point, and said, 'In compass and
variety of sound your own versification surpasses his.' Never shall
I forget the change in his countenance and tone of voice. The storm
was laid in a moment; he no longer disputed my judgment; and I
passed immediately in his mind, no doubt, for as great a critic as
ever lived."
It was with personages simple and unromantic as these that
Wordsworth filled the canvas of his longest poem. Judged by ordinary
standards the _Excursion_ appears an epic without action, and with
two heroes, the Pastor and the Wanderer, whose characters are
identical. Its form is cumbrous in the extreme, and large tracts of
it have little claim to the name of poetry. Wordsworth compares the
_Excursion_ to a temple of which his smaller poems form subsidiary
shrines; but the reader will more often liken the small poems to gems,
and the _Excursion_ to the rock from which they were extracted. The
long poem contains, indeed, magnificent passages, but as a whole it
is a diffused description of scenery which the poet has elsewhere
caught in brighter glimpses; a diffused statement of hopes and
beliefs which have crystallized more exquisitely elsewhere round
moments of inspiring emotion. The _Excursion_, in short, has the
drawbacks of a didactic poem as compared with lyrical poems; but,
judged as a didactic poem, it has the advantage of containing
teaching of true and permanent value.
I shall not attempt to deduce a settled scheme of philosophy from
these discourses among the mountains. I would urge only that as a
guide to conduct Wordsworth's precepts are not in themselves either
unintelligible or visionary. For whereas some moralists would have us
amend nature, and others bid us follow her, there is apt to be
something impracticable in the first maxim, and something vague in
the second. Asceticism, quietism, enthusiasm, ecstasy--all systems
which imply an unnatural repression or an unnatural excitation of
our faculties--are ill-suited for the mass of mankind. And on the
other hand, if we are told to follow nature, to develope our
original character, we are too often in doubt as to which of our
conflicting instincts to follow, what part of our complex nature to
accept as our regulating self. But Wordsworth, while impressing on
us conformity to nature as the rule of life, suggests a test of such
conformity which can be practically applied. "The child is father of
the man,"--in the words which stand as introduction to his poetical
works, and Wordsworth holds that the instincts and pleasures of a
healthy childhood sufficiently indicate the lines on which our
maturer character should be formed. The joy which began in the mere
sense of existence should be maintained by hopeful faith; the
simplicity which began in inexperience should be recovered by
meditation; the love which originated in the family circle should
expand itself over the race of men. And the calming and elevating
influence of Nature--which to Wordsworth's memory seemed the
inseparable concomitant of childish years--should be constantly
invoked throughout life to keep the heart fresh and the eyes open to
the mysteries discernible through her radiant veil. In a word, the
family affections, if duly fostered, the influences of Nature, if
duly sought, with some knowledge of the best books, are material
enough to "build up our moral being" and to outweigh the less
deep-seated impulses which prompt to wrong-doing.
If, then, surrounding influences make so decisive a difference in
man's moral lot, what are we to say of those who never have the
chance of receiving those influences aright; who are reared, with
little parental supervision, in smoky cities, and spend their lives
in confined and monotonous labour? One of the most impressive
passages in the _Excursion_ is an indignant complaint of the
injustice thus done to the factory child. Wordsworth was no
fanatical opponent of manufacturing industry. He had intimate
friends among manufacturers; and in one of his letters he speaks of
promising himself much pleasure from witnessing the increased regard
for the welfare of factory hands of which one of these friends had
set the example. But he never lost sight of the fact that the life
of the mill-hand is an anomaly--is a life not in the order of nature,
and which requires to be justified by manifest necessity and by
continuous care. The question to what extent we may acquiesce in the
continuance of a low order of human beings, existing for our
enjoyment rather than for their own, may be answered with
plausibility in very different tones; from the Communist who cannot
rest content in the inferiority of any one man's position to any
other's, to the philosopher who holds that mankind has made the most
eminent progress when a few chosen individuals have been supported
in easy brilliancy by a population of serfs or slaves. Wordsworth's
answer to this question is at once conservative and philanthropic.
He holds to the distinction of classes, and thus admits a difference
in the fulness and value of human lots. But he will not consent to
any social arrangement which implies a necessary _moral_ inferiority
in any section of the body politic; and he esteems it the
statesman's first duty to provide that all citizens shall be placed
under conditions of life which, however humble, shall not be
unfavourable to virtue.
His views on national education, which at first sight appear so
inconsistent, depend on the same conception of national welfare.
Wordsworth was one of the earliest and most emphatic proclaimers of
the duty of the State in this respect. The lines in which he insists
that every child ought to be taught to read are, indeed, often quoted
as an example of the moralizing baldness of much of his blank verse.
But, on the other hand, when a great impulse was given to education
(1820-30) by Bell and Lancaster, by the introduction of what was
called the "Madras system" of tuition by pupil-teachers, and the
spread of infant schools, Wordsworth was found unexpectedly in the
opposite camp. Considering as he did all mental requirements as
entirely subsidiary to moral progress, and in themselves of very
little value, he objected to a system which, instead of confining
itself to reading--that indispensable channel of moral nutriment--
aimed at communicating knowledge as varied and advanced as time and
funds would allow. He objected to the dissociation of school and
home life--to that relegation of domestic interests and duties to
the background, which large and highly-organized schools, and
teachers much above the home level, must necessarily involve. And
yet more strongly, and, as it may still seem to many minds, with
convincing reason, he objected to an eleemosynary system, which
"precludes the poor mother from the strongest motive human nature
can be actuated by for industry, for forethought, and self-denial."
"The Spartan," he said, "and other ancient communities, might
disregard domestic ties, because they had the substitution of country,
which we cannot have. Our course is to supplant domestic attachments,
without the possibility of substituting others more capacious. What
can grow out of it but selfishness?" The half-century which has
elapsed since Wordsworth wrote these words has evidently altered the
state of the question. It has impressed on us the paramount necessity
of national education, for reasons political and social too well
known to repeat. But it may be feared that it has also shifted the
incidence of Wordsworth's arguments in a more sinister manner, by
vastly increasing the number of those homes where domestic influence
of the kind which the poet saw around him at Rydal is altogether
wanting and school is the best avenue even to moral well-being.
"Heaven and hell," he writes in 1808, "are scarcely more different
from each other than Sheffield and Manchester, &c., differ from the
plains and valleys of Surrey, Essex, Cumberland, or Westmoreland."
It is to be feared, indeed, that even "the plains and valleys of
Surrey and Essex" contain many cottages whose spiritual and sanitary
conditions fall far short of the poet's ideal. But it is of course
in the great and growing centres of population that the dangers
which he dreads have come upon us in their most aggravated form. And
so long as there are in England so many homes to which parental care
and the influences of Nature are alike unknown, no protest in favour
of the paramount importance of these primary agencies in the
formation of character can be regarded as altogether out of date.
With such severe and almost prosaic themes is the greater part of
the _Excursion_ occupied. Yet the poem is far from being composed
throughout in a prosaic spirit. "Of its bones is coral made;" its
arguments and theories have lain long in Wordsworth's mind, and have
accreted to themselves a rich investiture of observation and feeling.
Some of its passages rank among the poet's highest flights. Such is
the passage in Book I describing the boy's rapture at sunrise; and
the picture of a sunset at the close of the same book. Such is the
opening of Book IV; and the passage describing the wild joy of
roaming through a mountain storm; and the metaphor in the same book
which compares the mind's power of transfiguring the obstacles which
beset her, with the glory into which the moon incorporates the
umbrage that would intercept her beams.
It would scarcely be possible at the present day that a work
containing such striking passages, and so much of substance and
elevation--however out of keeping it might be with the ruling taste
of the day--should appear without receiving careful study from many
quarters and warm appreciation in some recognized organs of opinion.
Criticism in Wordsworth's day was both less competent and less
conscientious, and the famous "This will never do" of Jeffrey in the
_Edinburgh Review_ was by no means an extreme specimen of the
general tone in which the work was received. The judgment of the
reviewers influenced popular taste; and the book was as decided a
pecuniary failure as Wordsworth's previous ventures had been.
And here, perhaps, is a fit occasion to speak of that strangely
violent detraction and abuse which formed so large an ingredient in
Wordsworth's life,--or rather, of that which is the only element of
permanent interest in such a matter,--his manner of receiving and
replying to it. No writer, probably, who has afterwards achieved a
reputation at all like Wordsworth's, has been so long represented by
reviewers as purely ridiculous. And in Wordsworth's manner of
acceptance of this fact we may discern all the strength, and
something of the stiffness, of his nature; we may recognize an almost,
but not quite, ideal attitude under the shafts of unmerited obloquy.
For he who thus is arrogantly censured should remember both the
dignity and the frailty of man; he should wholly forgive, and almost
wholly forget; but, nevertheless, should retain such serviceable
hints as almost any criticism, however harsh or reckless, can afford,
and go on his way with no bitter broodings, but yet (to use
Wordsworth's expression in another context) "with a melancholy in
the soul, a sinking inward into ourselves from thought to thought, a
steady remonstrance, and a high resolve."
How far his own self-assertion may becomingly be carried in reply,
is another and a delicate question. There is almost necessarily
something distasteful to us not only in self-praise but even in a
thorough self-appreciation. We desire of the ideal character that
his faculties of admiration should be, as it were, absorbed in an
eager perception of the merits of others,--that a kind of shrinking
delicacy should prevent him from appraising his own achievements
with a similar care. Often, indeed, there is something most winning
in a touch of humorous blindness: "Well, Miss Sophia, and how do
_you_ like the _Lady of the Lake_?" "Oh, I've not read it; papa
says there's nothing so bad for young people as reading bad poetry."
But there are circumstances under which this graceful absence of
self-consciousness can no longer be maintained. When a man believes
that he has a message to deliver that vitally concerns mankind, and
when that message is received with contempt and apathy, he is
necessarily driven back upon himself; he is forced to consider
whether what he has to say is after all so important, and whether
his mode of saying it be right and adequate. A necessity of this
kind was forced upon both Shelley and Wordsworth. Shelley--the very
type of self-forgetful enthusiasm--was driven at last by the world's
treatment of him into a series of moods sometimes bitter and
sometimes self-distrustful--into a sense of aloofness and detachment
from the mass of men, which the poet who would fain improve and
exalt them should do his utmost not to feel. On Wordsworth's more
stubborn nature the effect produced by many years of detraction was
of a different kind. Naturally introspective, he was driven by abuse
and ridicule into taking stock of himself more frequently and more
laboriously than ever. He formed an estimate of himself and his
writings which was, on the whole, (as will now be generally admitted,)
a just one; and this view he expressed when occasion offered--in
sober language, indeed, but with calm conviction, and with precisely
the same air of speaking from undoubted knowledge as when he
described the beauty of Cumbrian mountains or the virtue of Cumbrian
homes.
"It is impossible," he wrote to Lady Beaumont in 1807,
"that any expectations can be lower than mine concerning the
immediate effect of this little work upon what is called the public.
I do not here take into consideration the envy and malevolence, and
all the bad passions which always stand in the way of a work of any
merit from a living poet; but merely think of the pure, absolute,
honest ignorance in which all worldlings, of every rank and situation,
must be enveloped, with respect to the thoughts, feelings, and
images on which the life of my poems depends. The things which I
have taken, whether from within or without, what have they to do
with routs, dinners, morning calls, hurry from door to door, from
street to street, on foot or in carriage; with Mr. Pitt or Mr. Fox,
Mr. Paul or Sir Francis Burdett, the Westminster election or the
borough of Honiton? In a word--for I cannot stop to make my way
through the harry of images that present themselves to me--what have
they to do with endless talking about things that nobody cares
anything for, except as far as their own vanity is concerned, and
this with persons they care nothing for, but as their vanity or
_selfishness_ is concerned? What have they to do (to say all at
once) with a life without love? In such a life there can be no
thought; for we have no thought (save thoughts of pain), but as far
as we have love and admiration.
"It is an awful truth, that there neither is nor can be any genuine
enjoyment of poetry among nineteen out of twenty of those persons
who live, or wish to live, in the broad light of the world--among
those who either are, or are striving to make themselves, people of
consideration in society. This is a truth, and an awful one; because
to be incapable of a feeling of poetry, in my sense of the word, is
to be without love of human nature and reverence for God.
"Upon this I shall insist elsewhere; at present let me confine
myself to my object, which is to make you, my dear friend, as
easy-hearted as myself with respect to these poems. Trouble not
yourself upon their present reception. Of what moment is that
compared with what I trust is their destiny?--To console the
afflicted; to add sunshine to daylight, by making the happy happier;
to teach the young and the gracious of every age to see, to think,
and feel, and, therefore, to become more actively and securely
virtuous; this is their office, which I trust they will faithfully
perform, long after we (that is, all that is mortal of us,) are
mouldered in our graves."
Such words as these come with dignity from the mouth of a man like
Wordsworth when he has been, as it were, driven to bay,--when he is
consoling an intimate friend, distressed at the torrent of ridicule
which, as she fears, must sweep his self-confidence and his purposes
away. He may be permitted to assure her that "my ears are stone-dead
to this idle buzz, and my flesh as insensible as iron to these petty
stings," and to accompany his assurance with a reasoned statement of
the grounds of his unshaken hopes.
We feel, however, that such an expression of self-reliance on the
part of a great man should be accompanied with some proof that no
conceit or impatience is mixed with his steadfast calm. If he
believes the public to be really unable to appreciate himself, he
must show no surprise when they admire his inferiors; he must
remember that the case would be far worse if they admired no one at
all. Nor must he descend from his own unpopular merits on the plea
that after catching the public attention by what is bad he will
retain it for what is good. If he is so sure that he is in the right
he can afford to wait and let the world come round to him.
Wordsworth's conduct satisfies both these tests. It is, indeed,
curious to observe how much abuse this inoffensive recluse received,
and how absolutely he avoided returning it, Byron, for instance,
must have seemed in his eyes guilty of something far more injurious
to mankind than "a drowsy frowsy poem, called the _Excursion_,"
could possibly appear. But, except in one or two private letters,
Wordsworth has never alluded to Byron at all. Shelley's lampoon--a
singular instance of the random blows of a noble spirit, striking at
what, if better understood, it would eagerly have revered--
Wordsworth seems never to have read. Nor did the violent attacks of
the _Edinburgh_ and the _Quarterly Reviews_ provoke him to any
rejoinder. To "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers"--leagued against
him as their common prey--he opposed a dignified silence; and the
only moral injury which he derived from their assaults lay in that
sense of the absence of trustworthy external criticism which led him
to treat everything which he had once written down as if it were a
special revelation, and to insist with equal earnestness on his most
trifling as on his most important pieces--on _Goody Blake_ and
_The Idiot Boy_ as on _The Cuckoo_ or _The Daffodils_. The sense
of humour is apt to be the first grace which is lost under
persecution; and much of Wordsworth's heaviness and stiff exposition
of commonplaces is to be traced to a feeling, which he could
scarcely avoid, that "all day long he had lifted up his voice to a
perverse and gainsaying generation."
To the pecuniary loss inflicted on him by these adverse criticisms
he was justly sensible. He was far from expecting, or even desiring,
to be widely popular or to make a rapid fortune; but he felt that
the labourer was worthy of his hire, and that the devotion of years
to literature should have been met with some moderate degree of the
usual form of recognition which the world accords to those who work
for it. In 1820 he speaks of "the whole of my returns from the
writing trade not amounting to seven-score pounds," and as late as
1843, when at the height of his fame, he was not ashamed of
confessing the importance which he had always attached to this
particular.
"So sensible am I," he says, "of the deficiencies in all that I write,
and so far does everything that I attempt fall short of what I wish
it to be, that even private publication, if such a term may be
allowed, requires more resolution than I can command. I have written
to give vent to my own mind, and not without hope that, some time or
other, kindred minds might benefit by my labours; but I am inclined
to believe I should never have ventured to send forth any verses of
mine to the world, if it had not been done on the pressure of
personal occasions. Had I been a rich man, my productions, like this
_Epistle_, the _Tragedy of the Borderers_, &c., would most likely
have been confined to manuscript."
An interesting passage from an unpublished letter of Miss Wordsworth's,
on the _White Doe of Rylstone_, confirms this statement:--
"My brother was very much pleased with your frankness in
telling us that you did not perfectly like his poem. He wishes
to know what your feelings were--whether the tale itself did
not interest you--or whether you could not enter into the
conception of Emily's character, or take delight in that visionary
communion which is supposed to have existed between her and
the Doe. Do not fear to give him pain. He is far too much
accustomed to be abused to receive pain from it, (at least as far
as he himself is concerned.) My reason for asking you these
questions is, that some of our friends, who are equal admirers of
the _White Doe_ and of my brother's published poems, think
that _this_ poem will sell on account of the story; that is, that
the story will bear up those points which are above the level of the
public taste; whereas the two last volumes--except by a few
solitary individuals, who are passionately devoted to my
brother's works--are abused by wholesale."
"Now as his sole object in publishing this poem at present
would be for the sake of the money, he would not publish it if
he did not think, from the several judgments of his friends,
that it would be likely to have a sale. He has no pleasure in
publishing--he even detests it; and if it were not that he is
_not_ over wealthy, he would leave all his works to be
published after his death. William himself is sure that the
_White Doe_ will not sell or be admired, except by a very few,
at first; and only yields to Mary's entreaties and mine. We are
determined, however, if we are deceived this time, to let him
have his own way in future."
These passages must be taken, no doubt, as representing one aspect
only of the poet's impulses in the matter. With his deep conviction
of the world's real, though unrecognized, need of a pure vein of
poetry, we can hardly imagine him as permanently satisfied to defer
his own contribution till after his death. Yet we may certainly
believe that the need of money helped him to overcome much
diffidence as to publication; and we may discern something dignified
in his frank avowal of this when it is taken in connexion with his
scrupulous abstinence from any attempt to win the suffrages of the
multitude by means unworthy of his high vocation. He could never,
indeed, have written poems which could have vied in immediate
popularity with those of Byron or Scott. But the criticisms on the
first edition of the _Lyrical Ballads_ must have shown him that a
slight alteration of method,--nay even the excision of a few pages
in each volume, pages certain to be loudly objected to,--would have
made a marked difference in the sale and its proceeds. From this
point of view, even poems which we may now feel to have been
needlessly puerile and grotesque acquire a certain impressiveness,
when we recognize that the theory which demanded their composition
was one which their author was willing to uphold at the cost of some
years of real physical privation, and of the postponement for a
generation of his legitimate fame.