Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/717

Rh 675 respectful tone towards a poet of Wordsworth s greatness. Jeffrey s petulant &quot; This will never do,&quot; uttered, professedly at least, more in sorrow than in anger, because the poet would persist in spite of all friendly counsel in misapply ing his powers, 1 has become a byword of ridiculous critical cocksureness. But the curious thing is that The Excursion has not &quot; done,&quot; and that the Wordsworthians who laugh at Jeffrey are in the habit of repeating the substance of his criticism, though in more temperate and becoming language. Thus Dean Church, in a criticism at once sympathetic and judicious, after the usual fling at Jeffrey s &quot; insolence,&quot; goes on to say &quot;In The Excursion and The Prelude there are passages as magnificent as perhaps poet ever wrote ; but they are not specimens of the context in which they are embedded, and which in spite of them does not carry along with it the reader s honest enjoyment. We read on because we must. &quot; 2 This is the very substance of Jeffrey s criticism, which was far from being unreservedly damnatory, as the following will show : &quot;Besides those more extended passages of interest or beauty which we have quoted and omitted to quote, there are scattered up and down the book, and in the midst of its most repulsive portions, a very great number of single lines and images that sparkle like gems in the desert and startle us by an intimation of the great poetic powers that lie buried in the rubbish that has been heaped around them.&quot; Jeffrey, it will be seen, was not blind to the occasional felicities and unforgetable lines celebrated by Coleridge, and his general judgment on The Excursion has been abundantly ratified. 3 It is not upon The Excursion that Wordsworth s reputation as a poet can ever rest, whatever defence may be made for it as &quot;a chain of extremely valuable thoughts,&quot; varied by passages of lofty or quietly beautiful description, invigorating exhortation, and gentle pathos. The two &quot; books &quot; entitled The Churchyard among the Mountains are the only parts of the poem that derive much force from the scenic setting ; if they had been pub lished separately, they would probably have obtained at once a reception very different from that given to The Excursion as a whole. The dramatic setting is merely dead weight, not because the chief speaker is a pedlar Wordsworth fairly justifies this selection but because the pedlar, as a personality to be known, and loved, and respected, and listened to with interest, is not completely created. We know Uncle Toby better than Sterne, but we do not know the Wanderer so well as Wordsworth, and consequently we are more easily bored by him than by the poet speaking in his own person as he does in The Prelude. His cheerfulness after reciting the tale of Margaret at the ruined cottage is almost offensive ; the assigned motive 1 The lively lawyer, to whom reviewing v. as a recreation, obviously enjoyed the process of &quot;slating&quot; more than is quite consistent with his strong protestations of sorrow over the poet s waywardness; but it should not be overlooked that he did make ample acknowledgment, when he had sated himself with denunciations of the Wanderer s ver bosity, of the power and beauty of isolated passages. In the second part of his article, indeed, he quoted so much that was admirable that he confessed himself disposed to rescind his severe judgment, but re- perusal of the Wanderer s arguments convinced him that it could not be rescinded. Jeffrey s criticisms in their entirety are dead and buried, except for the professional student, but even critics have their humble rights, and it is time that his four opening words should re ceive the privilege of interment also, if they are not to be fairly interpreted. His criticism of The White Doe is valueless enough, because the sentiment of that poem is more abstruse, less palpable to the running reader; but what he said of The Excursion has simply been repeated in duller language by the Wordsworthians who have denounced his arrogance in daring to say it. 2 Ward s English Poets, vol. iv. p. 13. Mr Myers and Mrs Oliphant might be quoted to the same effect. 3 In joining The, Prelude with The Excursion in the same condem nation, Dean Church goes farther than Jeffrey. As a poem The Pre lude is infinitely superior ; its autobiographical character gives it a certain unity, and it contains a greater number of lofty passages in Wordsworth s best vein. for it in the beauty of nature that remains though the poor broken-hearted woman is gone is hardly higher than the dropsical scullion s philosophy in Tristram Shandy. &quot; He is dead. He is certainly dead, said Obadiah. So am not I, said the foolish scullion.&quot; 4 There can be little doubt that adverse criticism had a depressing influence on Wordsworth s poetical powers, not withstanding his nobly expressed defiance of it and his determination to hold on in his own path undisturbed. Its effect in retarding the sale of his poems and thus de priving him of the legitimate fruits of his industry was a favourite topic with him in his later years; 5 but the absence of general appreciation, and the ridicule of what he considered his best and most distinctive work, contributed in all probability to a still more unfortunate result the premature depression and deadening of his powers. He schooled himself to stoical endurance, but he was not superhuman, and in the absence of sympathy not only was any possibility of development checked but he ceased to write with the spontaneity and rapture of his earlier verse. The common theory that the marked stiffening of his powers after 1807 was the effect of age only may be true; but the coincidence of this falling off with the failure of the strenuous effort made in that year to conquer the hostility of critics and the indifference of the public makes the theory extremely doubtful as a whole truth. Words worth s true nature is often misjudged under the fallacy that the preacher of high and serene fortitude in the face of failure and misfortune must himself be imperturbable. On the contrary the most eloquent advocate of this heroic virtue is the man who most feels the need of it in the frailty of his own temper. It is on record that Words worth, with all his philosophy of consolation, did not easily recover serenity after domestic bereavements, and we go very far wrong when we confound his proud and self- reliant defiance of criticism with insensibility to it or power to rise at will above its disheartening and benumb ing influence. For five years after the condemnation of The Excursion Wordsworth published almost nothing that had not been composed before. The chief exception is the Thanksgiving Ode of 1816. He was occupied mainly in the task of putting his work and his aims more fully before the world, maintaining his position with dignity and unflinch ing courage, so far unmoved by criticism that he would not alter his course one jot for the sake of public favour. In 1815 he published a new edition of his poems, in the arrangement according to faculties and feelings in which they have since stood; and he sought to explain his 4 Charles Lamb s review of The Excursion in the Quarterly (Oct. 1814), in spite of the editor Gifford s modifications, remains the most sympathetic of competent criticisms of the poem. In one point there is an oversight, significant of the indefiniteness of Wordsworth s ex position ; Lamb supposes the conversion of the Solitary to be accom plished within The Excursion. It was really reserved for the third part of The Recluse. It was the poet s intention, as expressed in his conversations with Miss Fenwick, to effect this conversion not by argument, but by carrying the sceptic back to his native Scotland, making him witness of a sacrament service, and making early associ ations thereupon reassert themselves. This would have been in accordance with his theory of the value of early associations. What makes the position of the Solitary a little difficult to grasp at first is that Wordsworth, on principle, does not present this character in marked contrast to the other characters in the poem, but rather lays stress on what he has in common with them, tender-heartedness to wards suffering and intense enthusiasm for nature ; hence it arises that the reader cannot see without some study what it is that the other interlocutors find lacking in him, and aim at supplying to him. 3 Mr Matthew Arnold heard him say that for he knew not how many years his poetry had never brought him in enough to buy his slice-strings &quot; (preface to Selection, p. v. ). The literal facts are that he received 100 from the Longmans in 1800, and nothing more till he was sixty- five, when Moxon bought the copyright of his writings for 1000 (Prose Works, iii. 437).