HOW WORDSWORTH CAME TO WRITE BALLADS 183 experiences of Betty Foy, the mother of the Idiot Boy, would have commended themselves from the mere force of literary custom to thousands of readers, if dressed to advantage in the familiar sentimental prose style. And, although Wordsworth's style was not the familiar style, the taste for the kind of subject at least had been cultivated before his day. The story of the accident that led Wordsworth to write ballads on subjects taken from common life is well known, and was put on record by himself in a note to the "Idiot Boy." In the spring of 1798, when he and Coleridge were near neighbors and close friends, they proposed making a walking tour together, and to meet the expense it occurred to them to write together a ballad by the way and send it to the New Monthly Magazine. The poem of the "Ancient Mariner" was the result. Wordsworth made a few suggestions and contributed a few lines, but, as he says, "as we endeavored to proceed conjointly (I speak of the same evening) our respective manners proved so different that it would have been quite presumptuous in me to do any thing but separate from an undertaking upon which I could have been only a clog." He proceeded instead to write independently lyrical ballads "on natural subjects, taken from common life, but looked at, as far as might be, through an imaginative medium." The difference between the "Lyrical Ballads" and the "Ancient Mariner" represents the difference in individual character and history between Coleridge and Wordsworth. Ideas work themselves out differently according to the minds in which they take root. Wordsworth was country-bred, familiar only with the simple folk of the Northern dales till he was seventeen; and his experience of towns and townspeople did not evoke new sympathies to supplant the old. It was not merely the face of inanimate nature that had charms for him. He had the keenest sympathy with his humble country neighbors. The simple incidents of their lives interested him as much as they interested the humblest gossip in the hamlet or in the hill-side cottage, though in a different way. His imagination fastened on these incidents, and transfigured them. Consider, for example, the incidents of the "The Idiot Boy" as they would present themselves to an ordinary village gossip, and you will understand Wordsworth's theory about the creative function of the poet : "Imagination needs must stir, Dear maid, this truth believe, Old Betty Foy, who lives in the same house with Susan Gale, has an only child, Johnny, an idiot, whom she loves with all her heart. Susan falls ill, and Betty mounts her poor boy on a pony and sends him for the doctor. The boy does not return. Betty is alarmed and goes in search of him; finds him after a long search in a vale staring at the stars and listening to the hooting of the owls, perfectly delighted with them and himself. Susan meantime, left alone, gets anxious in her turn, ceases to feel her ailments, gets up and hobbles after, and the two old women, delighted with the recovery of Johnny, forget all about the illness, and bring him home in merry triumph. That is all the story of the Idiot Boy. To most people it must always appear trivial, yet when Wordsworth heard of the incident it haunted his imagination. He pictured to himself the Idiot Boy's delight when he was put on horseback, the mother's pride that he could be of some use, the fears that came over her as hour after hour passed and neither he nor the doctor came, her growing impatience, her wild agitated search in the moonlight, and her overflowing joy when at last she found the truant. Every stanza in the poem is a vivid picture of simple human MRS. OLIPHANT'S CRITICISMS 185 feeling, delightful if you have any interest in the motherly feelings of such a poor old woman as Betty Foy. But we cannot be surprised that so few entered into the spirit of Wordsworth's imagination. Even now, when his fame is established, and it is customary to denounce the purblind critics who ridiculed his first publication, we find "The Idiot Boy" generally given up as a mistaken experiment. Wordsworth unintentionally took a sweeping revenge on those early critics. when he rearranged his poems so that their chronological order cannot be followed without some trouble; for many people now loathe and detest and reprobate their memory who entirely agree with them. Mrs. Oliphant,-who, although she uses the now orthodox language against the worthless critics who sneered. at the "Lyrical Ballads "—the literary gladiators who fleshed their swords upon Wordsworth's first efforts,-condemns without knowing it the very poems that they condemned, and, in language equally strong, makes a comparison between "The Idiot Boy" and "John Gilpin," very much to the disadvantage of the former. "The choice of such colloquial familiarity of treatment," she says, "as suggests a jocular rather than a serious meaning, the absolute insignificance of the incident, and the absence of any attempt to give grace and dignity to the story, balked its effect completely as an exposition of nature, while the humor in it was too feeble, too diffuse, to give it a lively comic interest. Cowper had ventured to be quite as colloquial and realistic in John Gilpin,' with electrical effect." The comparison between "The Idiot Boy" and "John Gilpin " is not a happy one, for the two poems are in very different keys of humor: we are expected by the poet in the one case to smile with moist eyes and heart profoundly touched, and in the other to laugh heartily. Mrs. Oliphant complains of "the absolute insignificance of the incident,” and “the absence of any attempt to give grace and dignity to the story." While such complaints are made by professed admirers of Wordsworth, who find no words too hard for the injustice done him by the contemporary critics of the “Lyrical Ballads," how can Wordsworth be said to have created the taste by which he is enjoyed? His admirers now repeat the same criticisms of the same works. It was in defence of himself against such complaints as are made by Mrs. Oliphant and Mr. Myers that Wordsworth wrote his celebrated Preface. There are two passages from this Preface that are very often repeated: one that the language used in poetry should be the language really used by men, and the other that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling-that it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity. These two dicta have passed into literature as the quintessence of Wordsworth's poetical theory, and they fit in with the current conception of Wordsworth as the leader of the revolution against the poetical theories of the eighteenth century. But the Preface, as you will see if you read the whole of it, was much more limited in its purpose; it was apologetic, and not constructive; it was really an elaborate justification of his own practice in the case of the lyrical ballads, not the enunciation of a universally binding poetic creed, although Wordsworth, not the meekest of men, was inclined to take the aggressive against what his critics considered good poetry. We must read the Preface along with "The Idiot Boy," "The Thorn," "Goody Blake," "Peter Bell," and other ballads of the same class, if we would understand its purport. As the meaning of the theory that the language of poetry should be the language really used by men-a theory that every-body has heard of that has ever heard of the name of Wordsworth, as the meaning of this theory is not very generally understood-it may be worth while to recall what Wordsworth actually did say. RUSTIC LANGUAGE IN POETRY 187 "The principal object proposed in these poems [the "Lyrical Ballads"] was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate and describe them, throughout, as far as was possible, in a selection of language really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect; and further, and above all, to make these incidents and associations interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature, chiefly as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement." It is commonly supposed that by the language really used by men Wordsworth meant colloquial language, above all, for poetic purposes, the language of rustics; and, seeing that the vocabulary of an ordinary peasant is extremely limited, the theory has been laughed at as a preposterous limitation of poetry. But Wordsworth did not really propose any thing so absurd as this. He did, indeed, defend the choice for poetry of themes from rustic life and language from rustic life, because "the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language"; and because peasants "hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived," and "from their rank in life, and the sameness and narrow circle of their intercourse, being less under the influence of social vanity, they convey their feelings and notions in simple and unelaborated expressions." In this overstrained argument in his own defence Wordsworth undoubtedly went too far, and exposed himself to very obvious and easy ridicule. But even in this passage he did not commit himself to the theory that all poetry should be composed of such homely materials; he was only in a spirit of defiant paradox playing for a little with the idea that if a poet dealt only with the feelings of peasants, and used only words known to them, his poetry was likely to be more perma |