beautiful and valuable) from the real quality. The real quality it calls simplicité, the semblance simplesse. The one is natural simplicity, the other is artificial simplicity. What is called simplicity in the productions of a genius essentially not simple, is in truth simplesse. The two are distinguishable from one another the moment they appear in company. For instance, let us take the opening of the narrative in Wordsworth’s Michael:
There dwelt a shepherd, Michael was his name;
An old man, stout of heart, and strong of limb.
His bodily frame had been from youth to age
Of an unusual strength; his mind was keen,
Intense, and frugal, apt for all affairs;
And in his shepherd’s calling he was prompt
And watchful more than ordinary men.
Now let us take the opening of the narrative in Mr. Tennyson’s Dora:
William and Dora. William was his son,
And she his niece. He often look’d at them,
And often thought, “I’ll make them man and wife.”
The simplicity of the first of these passages is simplicité; that of the second, simplesse. Let us take the end of the same two poems; first, of Michael:–
Is gone–the ploughshare has been through the ground
On which it stood; great changes have been wrought
and to create. In lyrical poetry, in the direct expression of personal feeling, the most subtle genius may, under the momentary pressure of passion, express itself simply. Even here, however, the native tendency will generally be discernible.
