Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/715

Rh ft D S W R T H 673 recognition of these elementary principles of poetic evolution powerfully affected Wordsworth s practice. One of these may be indicated, though not fully ex pressed, by saying that he endeavoured always to work out an emotional motive from within. Instead of choosing a striking theme and working at it like a decorative painter, embellishing, enriching, dressing to advantage, standing back from it and studying effects, his plan was to take incidents that had set his own imagination spontaneously to work, and to study and reproduce with artistic judgment the modification of the initial feeling, the emotional motive, within himself. There is room for an endless amount of subtle discussion, which would be out of place here, as to the exact difference between the methods thus broadly stated. It is obvious that they tend to approximate, inasmuch as all poets must work to some extent from within and all to some extent from without. The mere fact of using words, the medium of communication between man and man, implies a reference, unconscious or deliberate, to the effect produced on others. But undoubtedly in Wordsworth s case the reference to others was of deliberate purpose as much as possible suppressed. Probably from natural stiffness of temper, he could not make it easily, and found the effort, as it must always be when it is an effort and not a happy instinct, embarrassing and chilling. At any rate, if an association, to use his own terminology, gave pleasure to himself, he did not pause long to consider the probable effect on others. If he did reflect upon it when the act of composition was over, he was often able to satisfy him self that, if an association which seemed to him just, reasonable, and humane, was not acceptable to general sentiment, the general sentiment was corrupt. To this, as he himself with his ! habits of self-criticism was fully aware, was owing much of his strength and much of his unpopularity. By keeping his eye on the object, as spontaneously modified by his own imaginative energy, he was able to give full and undistracted scope to all his powers in poetic coinage of the wealth that his imagina tion brought. On the other hand, readers whose nature or education was different from his own, were repelled or left cold and indifferent, or obliged to make the sympa thetic effort to seo with his eyes, which he refused to make in order that he might see with theirs. &quot; He is retired as noontide dew Or fountain in a noon-day grove, And you must love him ere to you He will seem worthy of your love.&quot; From this habit of taking the processes of his own mind as the standard of the way in which &quot;men associate ideas in a state of excitement,&quot; and language familiar to himself as the standard of the language of &quot;real men,&quot; arises a superficial anomaly in Wordsworth s poetry, an apparent contradiction between his practice and his theory. His own imagination, judged by ordinary standards, was easily excited, excited by emotional motives that have little force with ordinary men. Most of his poems start from humbler, slighter, less generally striking themes than those of any other poet of high rank. But his poetry is not corre spondingly simple. On the contrary, much of it, much of the best of it for example, the Ode to Duty, and that on the Intimations of Immortality is as intricate, elaborate, and abstruse, as remote from the ordinary paths of thought, as is to be found in literature. The emotional motive is simple ; the passion has almost always a simple origin, and often is of no great intensity ; but the imaginative structure is generally elaborate, and, when the poet is at his best, supremely splendid and gorgeous. No poet has built such magnificent palaces of rare material for the ordinary everyday homely human affections. It is because he has invested our ordinary everyday principles of con duct, which are so apt to become threadbare, with such imperishable robes of finest texture and richest design that Wordsworth holds so high a place among the great moral ists, the greatest of moralists in verse. And yet he attained this end in his most effectively moral poems, though not by any means in all his poems, without in the least con fusing the boundaries between poetry and preaching, his conception of the end of poetry as immediate pleasure serving him as a load-star. His practice was influenced also, and not always for good, by his theory that poetry &quot;takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity/ This was a somewhat doubtful corollary from his general theory of poetic evolu tion. A poem is complete in itself; there must be no sting in it to disturb the reader s content with the whole ; through whatever agitations it progresses, to whatever elevations it soars, to this end it must come, otherwise it is imperfect as a poem. Now the imagination in ordinary men, though the process is not expressed in verse, and the poet s special art lias thus no share in producing the effect, reaches the poetic end when it has so transfigured a dis turbing experience, whether of joy or grief, that this rests tranquilly in the memory, can be recalled without dis quietude, and dwelt upon with some mode and degree of pleasure, more or less keen, more or less pure or mixed with pain. True to his idea of imitating real life, Words worth made it a rule for himself not to write on any theme till his imagination had operated upon it for some time involuntarily ; it was not in his view ripe for poetic treat ment till this transforming agency had subdued the original emotion to a state of tranquillity. 1 Out of this tranquillity arises the favourable moment for poetic composition, some day when, as he contemplates the subject, the tranquillity disappears, an emotion kindred to the original emotion is reinstated, and the poet retraces and supplements with all his art the previous involuntary and perhaps unconscious imaginative chemistry. When we study the moments that Wordsworth found favourable for successful composition, a very curious law reveals itself, somewhat at variance with the common con ception of him as a poet who derived all his strength from solitary communion with nature. AVe find that the recluse s best poems were written under the excitement of some break in the monotony of his quiet life change of scene, change of companionship, change of occupation. The law holds from the beginning to the end of his poetic career. We have already noticed the immense stimulus given to his powers by his first contact with Coleridge after two years of solitary and abortive effort. Above Tintern Abbey was composed during a four days ramble with his sister ; he began it on leaving Tintern, and con cluded it as he was entering Bristol. His residence amidst strange scenes and &quot; unknown men &quot; at Goslar was parti cularly fruitful: She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways, Ruth, Xutling, There ivas a Boy, Wisdom and Spirit of the Universe, all belong to those few months of unfamiliar environment. The breeze that met him as he issued from the city gates on his homeward journey brought him the first thought of The Prelude. The second year of his residence at Grasmere was unproductive; he was &quot;hard at work &quot; then on The Excursion ; but the excitement of his tour on the Continent in the autumn of 1802, combined perhaps with a happy change in his pecuniary circum stances and the near prospect of marriage, roused him to one of his happiest fits of activity. His first great sonnet, 1 The Prelude contains a record of his practice, after the opening lines of the first book &quot; Thus far, O friend did I, not used to make A present joy the matter of a song, Pour forth, &amp;lt;tc.&quot; XXIV. -- 85