“The maid, alas! her thoughts are gone,
She nothing sees—no sight but one!
The maid, devoid of guile and sin,
I know not how, in fearful wise,
So deeply had she drunken in
That look, those shrunken serpent eyes,
That all her features were resigned
To this sole image in her mind:
And passively did imitate
That look of dull and treacherous hate.”
What Wordsworth intended we have already heard from Coleridge, and
Wordsworth confirms him. It was, says the Preface of 1802, “to present
ordinary things to the mind in an unusual way.” In Wordsworth the
miraculous inherent in the commonplace, but obscured by “the film of
familiarity,” is restored to it. This translation is effected by the
imagination, which is not fancy nor dreaming, as Wordsworth is careful to
warn us, but that power by which we see things as they are. The authors
of _The Ancient Mariner_ and _Simon Lee_ are justified in claiming a
common object. It is to prove that the metaphysical in Shakespeare’s
sense of the word interpenetrates the physical, and serves to make us see
and feel it.
Poetry, if it is to be good for anything, must help us to live. It is to
this we come at last in our criticism, and if it does not help us to live
it may as well disappear, no matter what its fine qualities may be. The
help to live, however, that is most wanted is not remedies against great
sorrows. The chief obstacle to the enjoyment of life is its dulness and
the weariness which invades us because there is nothing to be seen or
done of any particular value. If the supernatural becomes natural and
the natural becomes supernatural, the world regains its splendour and
charm. Lines may be drawn from their predecessors to Coleridge and the
Wordsworths, but the work they did was distinctly original, and renewed
proof was given of the folly of despair even when fertility seems to be
exhausted. There is always a hidden conduit open into an unknown region
whence at any moment streams may rush and renew the desert with foliage
and flowers.
The reviews which followed the publication of the _Lyrical Ballads_ were
nearly all unfavourable. Even Southey discovered nothing in _The Ancient
Mariner_ but “a Dutch attempt at German sublimity.” A certain learned
pig thought it “the strangest story of a cock and bull that he ever saw
on paper,” and not a single critic, not even the one or two who had any
praise to offer, discerned the secret of the book. The publisher was so
alarmed that he hastily sold his stock. Nevertheless Coleridge,
Wordsworth, and his sister quietly went off to Germany without the least
disturbance of their faith, and the _Ballads_ are alive to this day.