W R D S W R T H 671 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 cow/; de grace. But the truth is that neither of the two assumptions is warranted ; not only so, but both were expressly disclaimed by Wordsworth in the Preface itself. There is not a single qualification introduced by Coleridge in correction of the theory that was not made by Wordsworth himself in the original statement. 1 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, undertaken at the instance of friends interested in "a class of poetry well adapted to in terest mankind permanently, and not unimportant in the quality and in the multiplicity of its moral relations." He 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. To make it perfectly clear that he was pleading only for his own maligned and misunder stood poems, he repeated at the close of the Preface that, "if his purpose were fulfilled, a species of poetry would be produced which is genuine poetry, in its nature well adapted to interest mankind, <fcc." It is true that he said also that, "in order entirely to enjoy the poetry which I am recommending, it would be necessary to give up much of what is ordinarily enjoyed "; but the context makes it plain that in so saying he referred to startling incident and gaudy ornament, his own purpose being to make "the feel ing give importance to the action and situation, not the action and situation to the feeling," and to use language as near as possible to the language of real life. In the second place, as regards this language of real life, and 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 figur ative, and not structure and order, or, as Coleridge other wise puts it, the "ordonnance" of composition. Coleridge says that if he meant this he was only uttering a truism, which nobody that knew Wordsworth would suspect him of doing ; but, strange to say, it is as a truism, nominally acknowledged by everybody, that Wordsworth does ad vance 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 1 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 Cole ridge 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, Cole ridge 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. 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"; and what he wished to establish, as may be seen by any person of average intelli gence who grapples honestly with his stiff and condensed exposition, and interprets it with reference to the contro versy in which it was an incident, was the simple truth that what is false, unreal, affected, bombastic, or non sensical in prose is not less so in verse. There was no greater heresy than this in Wordsworth s theory of poetic diction. 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 para doxical 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 with out affecting in the least his main thesis. The drift of this is fairly apparent all through, but stands out in un mistakable clearness in his criticism of the passages from Johnson and Cowper. " But the sound of the church-going bell These valleys ami 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. Poetic licence does not justify bad grammar. Whether this is strictly defensible or not, all the same it illustrates his contention. 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 " ; and it is mere pedantry to detach this phrase from the context, and hold him bound by the precise scholastic sense of the word essential to a meaning that he expressly repudiates. So far is Wordsworth from contending that the metrical order should always be the same with the prose order, that part of the preface is devoted to a subtle analysis of the peculiar effect of metrical arrangement, assigning the pleasure proper to this as his reason for writing in verse rather than in prose, and repeating again and again such phrases as "fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation," and "language closely resembling that of real life, and yet in the circumstance of metre differing from it. so widely." 2 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 farthest 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. - He expressly admitted also that, in the expression of passion, owing to "the tendency of metre to divest language to a certain degree of its reality," a strength of language might be used in verse that good
taste would not tolerate in prose.