took over Cottle’s publishing business in 1799, the value of the copyright of the Lyrical Ballads, for which Cottle had paid thirty guineas, was assessed at nil. Cottle therefore begged that it might be excluded altogether from the bargain, and presented it to the authors. But in 1800, when the first edition was exhausted, the Longmans offered Wordsworth £100 for two issues of a new edition with an additional volume and an explanatory preface. The sum was small compared with what Scott and Byron soon afterwards received, but it shows that the public neglect was not quite so complete as is sometimes represented. Another edition was called for in 1802, and a fourth in 1805. The new volume in the 1800 edition was made up of poems composed during his residence at Goslar in Germany (where he went with Coleridge) in the winter of 1798–1799, and after his settlement at Grasmere in December 1799. It contained a large portion of poems now universally accepted:—Ruth, Nutting, Three Years She Grew, A Poet’s Epitaph, Hartleap Well, Lucy Gray, The Brothers, Michael, The Old Cumberland Beggar, Poems on the Naming of Places. But it contained also the famous Preface, in which he infuriated critics by presuming to defend his eccentricities in an elaborate theory of poetry and poetic diction.
This document (and let it be noted that all Wordsworth’s Prefaces are of the utmost interest in historical literary criticism) is constantly referred to as a sort of revolutionary proclamation against the established taste of the 18th century. For one who has read Wordsworth’s original, hundreds have read Coleridge’s brilliant criticism, and the fixed conception of the doctrines put forth by Wordsworth is taken from that.[1] It is desirable, therefore, considering the celebrity of the affair, that Wordsworth’s own position should be made clear. Coleridge’s criticism of his friend’s theory proceeded avowedly “on the assumption that his words had been rightly interpreted, as purporting that the proper diction for poetry in general consists altogether in a language taken, with due exceptions, from the mouths of men in real life, a language which actually constitutes the natural conversation of men under the influence of natural feelings.” Coleridge assumed further that, when Wordsworth spoke of there being “no essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition,” he meant by language not the mere words but the style, the structure and the order of the sentences; on this assumption he argued as if Wordsworth had held that the metrical order should always be the same as the prose order. Given these assumptions, which formed the popular interpretation of the theory by its opponents, it was easy to demonstrate its absurdity, and Coleridge is very generally supposed to have given Wordsworth’s theory in its bare and naked extravagance the coup de grâce. But the truth is that neither of the two assumptions is warranted; both were expressly disclaimed by Wordsworth in the Preface itself. There is not a single qualification introduced by Coleridge that was not made by Wordsworth himself in the original statement.[2] In the first place, it was not put forward as a theory of poetry in general, though from the vigour with which he carried the war into the enemy’s country it was naturally enough for polemic purposes taken as such; it was a statement and defence of the principles on which his own poems of humbler life were composed. Wordsworth also assailed the public taste as “depraved,” first and mainly in so far as it was adverse to simple incidents simply treated, being accustomed to “gross and violent stimulants,” “craving after extraordinary incident," possessed with a “degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation,” “frantic novels, sickly and stupid German tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse.” This, and not adherence to the classical rule of Pope, which had really suffered deposition a good half century before, was the first count in Wordsworth’s defensive indictment of the taste of his age. As regards the “poetic diction,” the liking for which was the second count in his indictment of the public taste, it is most explicitly clear that, when he said that there was no essential difference between the language of poetry and the language of prose, he meant words, plain and figurative, and not structure and order, or, as Coleridge otherwise puts it, the “ordonnance” of composition. Coleridge says that if he meant this he was only uttering a truism, which nobody who knew Wordsworth would suspect him of doing; but, strange to say, it is as a truism, nominally acknowledged by everybody, that Wordsworth does advance his doctrine on this point. Only he adds—“if in what I am about to say it shall appear to some that my labour is unnecessary, and that I am like a man fighting a battle without enemies, such persons may be reminded that, whatever be the language outwardly holden by men, a practical faith in the opinions which I am wishing to establish is almost unknown.”
What he wished to establish was the simple truth that what is false, unreal, affected, bombastic or nonsensical in prose is not less so in verse. The form in which he expresses the theory was conditioned by the circumstances of the polemic, and readers were put on a false scent by his purely incidental and collateral and very much overstrained defence of the language of rustics, as being less conventional and more permanent, and therefore better fitted to afford materials for the poet’s selection. But this was a side issue, a paradoxical retort on his critics, seized upon by them in turn and made prominent as a matter for easy ridicule; all that he says on this head might be cut out of the Preface without affecting in the least his main thesis. The drift of this is fairly apparent all through, but stands out in unmistakable clearness in his criticism of the passages from Johnson and Cowper:—
“But the sound of the church-going bell
These valleys and rocks never heard,
Ne'er sighed at the sound of a knell
Or smiled when a Sabbath appeared.”
The epithet “church-going” offends him as a puritan in grammar; whether his objection is well founded or ill founded, it applies equally to prose and verse. To represent the valleys and rocks as sighing and smiling in the circumstances would appear feeble and absurd in prose composition, and is not less so in metrical composition; “the occasion does not justify such violent expressions.” These are examples of all that Wordsworth meant by saying that “there is no essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition.” So far is Wordsworth from contending that the metrical order should always be the same as the prose order, that part of the Preface is devoted to a subtle analysis of the peculiar effect of metrical arrangement. What he objects to is not departure from the structure of prose, but the assumption, which seemed to him to underlie the criticisms of his ballads, that a writer of verse is not a poet unless he uses artificially ornamental language, not justified by the strength of the emotion expressed. The furthest that he went in defence of prose structure in poetry was to maintain that, if the words in a verse happened to be in the order of prose, it did not follow that they were prosaic in the sense of being unpoetic—a side-stroke at critics who complained of his prosaisms for no better reason than that the words stood in the order of prose composition. Wordsworth was far from repudiating elevation of style in poetry. “If,” he said, “the poet’s subject be judiciously chosen, it will naturally, and upon fit occasion, lead him to passions the language of which, if selected truly and judiciously, must necessarily be dignified and variegated, and alive with metaphors and figures.”
- ↑ Sir Henry Taylor, one of the most acute and judicious of Wordsworth’s champions, came to this conclusion in 1834.
- ↑ Although Coleridge makes the qualifications more prominent than they were in the original statement, the two theories are at bottom so closely the same that one is sometimes inclined to suspect that parts, at least, of the original emanated from the fertile mind of Coleridge himself. The two poets certainly discussed the subject together in Somerset when the first ballads were written, and Coleridge was at Grasmere when the Preface was prepared in 1800. The diction of the Preface is curiously Hartleian, and, when they first met, Coleridge was a devoted disciple of Hartley, naming his first son after the philosopher, while Wordsworth detested analytic psychology. If Coleridge did contribute to the original theory in 1798 or 1800, he was likely enough to have forgotten the fact by 1814. At any rate, he evidently wrote his criticism without making a close study of the Preface, and what he did in effect was to restate the original theory against popular misconceptions of it.
