really intense silliness of the mother cannot be pardoned on the score of her affection : "Johnny, Johnny, mind that you Come home again, nor stop at all— My Johnny do, I pray you, do!" And the poet's exclamation at seeing Johnny astride on the pony that was so "mild and good: "O happy, happy, happy, John ! " So perfectly regardless-or perhaps so defiantly proud-was Wordsworth of what he thought natural, but what in poetry certainly strikes us as being ridiculous, diction. Indeed one can hardly conceive the most ardent admirer of Wordsworth not wishing that much of this character could be eliminated from his poems. And yet at the same time one's loyalty and reverence for the poet is not a whit lessened by this. Why is it so? Why, for instance, though such an effusion as the "Idiot Boy" or "Goody Blake" by most poet's would lower them indescribably in our estimation, do we not have this feeling with regard to Wordsworth? I think it is because we are conscious of the fact that-like some intensely earnest, and even highly imaginative persons-he is utterly deficient in humour. The sense of humour seems to consist in the perception of incongruity. In most of us there is an inborn consciousness of the danger of that fatal step-that facilis descensus-from the brink of the sublime into the abyss of the ridiculous. In Wordsworth this sense seems to be utterly wanting. No surgical operation, such as was recommended by Sydney Smith in the case of the Scotchman, could have ever insinuated into his head the perception of the ludicrous effect of his verses on those who are the victims of a demonic power compelling them to see the ridiculous element in such things--often all the more intensely ridiculous by contrast with the pathetic or the sublime. Naturally nothing affords richer and easier sport for the humourists than those who, being without humour themselves, are utterly defenceless and at the mercy of their waggish persecutors. To parody this class of Wordsworth's poems is easy to parody, that is, their external form. Probably all know the well-known parody in "Rejected Addresses," which great Jeffrey, the king of critics, calls a "flattering imitation." To sum up the matter of what is called poetic as against natural diction, if poetic diction means a certain pompous learned language which every poet must adopt for all subjects and moods-then poetic diction is worse than a ludicrous striving after the diction of common speech. But if it means that language which the poet creates, no less than he does create his thoughts, and which is the bestperhaps the only true-exponent of his thoughts, then poetic diction is a necessity. Q But, besides this, Wordsworth would have us believe that the thoughts and language most suitable for poetry are to be found-not among the learned and refined-not even among the educated-but among the poor and uneducated classes. As I have remarked before, we shall not find many among such people who will appreciate Wordsworth's poetry, however much they might appreciate the poet's sympathies if expressed unpoetically, especially if expressed by acts rather than words. There are many things that militate against the appreciation of poetry in this class-especially perhaps in England. The toils and anxieties in earning their bread; the consequent want of leisure and of opportunities for thinking of anything but the gross external facts of life; the low sensual pleasures that occupy them to the exclusion of intellectual recreation,-all these things, and others, preclude them to a great extent from learning from poetry (what indeed they may learn otherwise; for I believe means are given to all for the purpose)—from learning, I say, by means of poetry, to attain to the Divine Idea. And so, if he wrote for such readers, Wordsworth's poems are practically a failure; while if he did not write for them but for others, why did he choose these subjects and this language? He tells us his reason. It is because what he calls the "essential passions" find their fullest development in this class. It may be true-though I much doubt it. I do not for an instant doubt that the poor and uneducated may be morally the equals or the superiors of the rich, the refined, and the educated. But a moral state depends, it seems to me, on the counterbalance of temptation and resistance; and this equilibrium may be just as perfect—that is, the moral state may be just as high-when both temptation and resistance are small, as when they are great. But does poetry only dwell on such a state of equipoise, or the slight vacillations of the lightly laden balance? No: it requires for its subject the full development of human nature with all its passions in all its various forms; not only in the sins and sorrows of a village maiden, or the despondent woes of a solitary recluse, but in other shapes and forms-in the mad passion of a King Lear, the fiendish villainies of a King Richard or an Iago, in the love of a Romeo, in the jealousy of an Othello, in the aristocratic pride of a Coriolanus. The question is whether, by adopting such subjects and language, Wordsworth has not done a work which no other poet has done for us. I think he has. He might have done great things otherwise, but he has done one thing supremely well, and for this we look to him as we look to no one else. He has revealed to us the meanings of common things, so that what we see around us in the world-the wayside flowers, the clouds, the stars the common acts and feelings of everyday life, the ordinary people that we meet-are now no longer merely flowers and clouds and stars and acts and feelings and people, passing as a panorama before our senses, viewed by us (to use the poet's own words) in "disconnection, dead and spiritless;" they have now a vital connection with our very existence, and form a part of ourselves as all things do when they are once viewed in connection with the central truth by which we live. Now, this power of appropriating natural objects, so that they become (if one may so express it) a very part of one's sentient organism, until at length all nature around us, from the tiniest flower to the stars of the midnight sky, is but one mighty living thing, at whose centre lies our own soul-a living thing pulsating with the same life,—such a power Wordsworth speaks of as a philosopher, and such a power does he develop in us as a poet by his poetry. Let us hear him as a philosopher—that is, speaking theoretically of this faculty. First, all faculties must have an object, and these two must be adapted for each other : "My voice proclaims How exquisitely the individual mind to the external world Is fitted, and how exquisitely too. . . The external world is fitted to the mind." But though the mind is the receptive medium, it is not by thought but by a faculty above and |