Coleridge, with rare insight, summarized Wordsworth's characteristic
defects and merits as follows;
"The first characteristic, though only occasional defect, which I
appear to myself to find in these poems is the inconstancy of the
style. Under this name I refer to the sudden and unprepared
transitions from lines or sentences of peculiar felicity (at all events
striking and original) to a style, not only unimpassioned but
undistinguished.
"The second defect I can generalize with tolerable accuracy, if the
reader will pardon an uncouth and newly-coined word. There is, I
should say, not seldom a _matter-of-factness_ in certain poems. This
may be divided into, first, a laborious minuteness and fidelity in the
representation of objects, and there positions, as they appeared to the
poet himself; secondly, the insertion of accidental circumstances, in
order to the full explanation of his living characters, their
dispositions and actions; which circumstances might be necessary to
establish the probability of a statement in real life, when nothing is
taken for granted by the hearer; but appear superfluous in poetry,
where the reader is willing to believe for his own sake. . .
"Third; an undue predilection for the _dramatic_ form in certain poems,
from which one or other of two evils result. Either the thoughts and
diction are different from that of the poet, and then there arises an
incongruity of style; or they are the same and indistinguishable, where
two are represented as talking, while in truth one man only speaks. . .
"The fourth class of defects is closely connected with the former; but
yet are such as arise likewise from an intensity of feeling
disproportionate to such knowledge and value of the objects described,
as can be fairly anticipated of men in general, even of the most
cultivated classes; and with which therefore few only, and those few
particularly circumstanced, can be supposed to sympathize: in this
class, I comprise occasional prolixity, repetition, and an eddying,
instead of progression, of thought. . .
"Fifth and last; thoughts and images too great for the subject. This
is an approximation to what might be called mental bombast, as
distinguished from verbal: for, as in the latter there is a
disproportion of the expressions to the thoughts, so in this there is a
disproportion of thought to the circumstance and occasion. . .
"To these defects, which . . . are only occasional, I may oppose . . .
the following (for the most part correspondent) excellencies:
"First; an austere purity of language both grammatically and logically;
in short a perfect appropriateness of the words to the meaning. . .
"The second characteristic excellence of Mr. Wordsworth's works is--a
correspondent weight and sanity of the thoughts and sentiments, won not
from books, but from the poet's own meditative observations. They are
fresh and have the dew upon them. . .
"Third; . . . the sinewy strength and originality of single lines and
paragraphs; the frequent _curiosa felicitas_ of his diction. . .
"Fourth; the perfect truth of nature in his images and descriptions as
taken immediately from nature, and proving a long and genial intimacy
with the very spirit which gives the physiognomic expressions to all
the works of nature. Like a green field reflected in a calm and
perfectly transparent lake, the image is distinguished from the reality
only by its greater softness and lustre. Like the moisture or the
polish on a pebble, genius neither distorts nor false-colors its
objects; but on the contrary, brings out many a vein and many a tint,
which escape the eye of common observation, thus raising to the rank of
gems what had been often kicked away by the hurrying foot of the
traveller on the dusty high-road of custom. . .
"Fifth; a meditative pathos, a union of deep and subtle thought with
sensibility; a sympathy with man as man; the sympathy indeed of a
contemplator, rather than a fellow-sufferer or co-mate, but of a
contemplator, from whose view no difference of rank conceals the
sameness of the nature; no injuries of wind or weather, of toil, or
even of ignorance, wholly disguise the human face divine. The
superscription and the image of the Creator still remains legible to
_him_ under the dark lines, with which guilt or calamity had cancelled
or cross-barred it. Here the Man and the Poet lose and find themselves
in each other, the one as glorified, the latter as substantiated. In
this mild and philosophic pathos, Wordsworth appears to me without a
compeer. Such as he is; so he writes.
"Last and pre-eminently, I challenge for this poet the gift of
imagination in the highest and strictest sense of the word. In the
play of fancy, Wordsworth, to my feelings, is not always graceful, and
sometimes recondite. . . But in imaginative power, he stands nearest of
all writers to Shakespeare and Milton; and yet in a kind perfectly
unborrowed and his own."
These are the grounds upon which Coleridge bases the poetic claims of
Wordsworth.
Matthew Arnold, in the preface to his well-known collection of
Wordsworth's poems, accords to the poet a rank no less exalted. "I
firmly believe that the poetical performance of Wordsworth is, after
that of Shakespeare and Milton, of which all the world now recognizes
the worth, undoubtedly the most considerable in our language from the
Elizabethan age to the present time." His essential greatness is to be
found in his shorter pieces, despite the frequent intrusion of much
that is very inferior. Still it is "by the great body of powerful and
significant work which remains to him after every reduction and
deduction has been made, that Wordsworth's superiority is proved."
Coleridge had not dwelt sufficiently, perhaps, upon the joyousness
which results from Wordsworth's philosophy of human life and external
nature. This Matthew Arnold considers to be the prime source of his
greatness. "Wordsworth's poetry is great because of the extraordinary
power with which Wordsworth feels the joy offered to us in the simple
primary affections and duties; and because of the extraordinary power
with which, in case after case, he shows us this joy, and renders it so
as to make us share it." Goethe's poetry, as Wordsworth once said, is
not inevitable enough, is too consciously moulded by the supreme will
of the artist. "But Wordsworth's poetry," writes Arnold, "when he is
at his best, is inevitable, as inevitable as Nature herself. It might
seem that Nature not only gave him the matter for his poem, but wrote
his poem for him." The set poetic style of _The Excursion_ is a
failure, but there is something unique and unmatchable in the simple
grace of his narrative poems and lyrics. "Nature herself seems, I say,
to take the pen out of his hand, and to write for him with her own
bare, sheer, penetrating power. This arises from two causes: from the
profound sincereness with which Wordsworth feels his subject, and also
from the profoundly sincere and natural character of his subject
itself. He can and will treat such a subject with nothing but the most
plain, first hand, almost austere naturalness. His expression may
often be called bald, as, for instance, in the poem of _Resolution and
Independence_; but it is bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with
a baldness which is full of grandeur. . . Wherever we meet with the
successful balance, in Wordsworth, of profound truth of subject with
profound truth of execution, he is unique."
Professor Dowden has also laid stress upon the harmonious balance of
Wordsworth's nature, his different faculties seeming to interpenetrate
one another, and yield mutual support. He has likewise called
attention to the austere naturalism of which Arnold speaks.
"Wordsworth was a great naturalist in literature, but he was also a
great Idealist; and between the naturalist and the idealist in
Wordsworth no opposition existed: each worked with the other, each
served the other. While Scott, by allying romance with reality, saved
romantic fiction from the extravagances and follies into which it had
fallen, Wordsworth's special work was to open a higher way for
naturalism in art by its union with ideal truth."
Criticism has long since ceased to ridicule his _Betty Foy_, and his
_Harry Gill_, whose "teeth, they chatter, chatter still." Such
malicious sport proved only too easy for Wordsworth's contemporaries,
and still the essential value of his poetry was unimpaired.
The range of poetry is indeed inexhaustible, and even the greatest
poets must suffer some subtraction from universal pre-eminence.
Therefore we may frankly admit the deficiencies of Wordsworth,--that he
was lacking in dramatic force and in the power of characterization;
that he was singularly deficient in humor, and therefore in the saving
grace of self-criticism in the capacity to see himself occasionally in
a ridiculous light; that he has little of the romantic glamor and none
of the narrative energy of Scott; that Shelley's lyrical flights leave
him plodding along the dusty highway; and that Byron's preternatural
force makes his passion seen by contrast pale and ineffectual. All
this and more may freely be granted, and yet for his influence upon
English thought, and especially upon the poetic thought of his country,
he must be named after Shakespeare and Milton. The intellectual value
of his work will endure; for leaving aside much valuable doctrine,
which from didactic excess fails as poetry, he has brought into the
world a new philosophy of Nature and has emphasised in a manner
distinctively his own the dignity of simple manhood.--_Pelham Edgar_.