Ballads explains them clearly enough for any one who is fairly acquainted with the English poetry of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; and no amount of explanation will make them clear to any one who is not. The whole of our modern attitude towards nature and towards the art of interpreting nature through language has been so largely created by Wordsworth and Coleridge and by later writers, in most respects dissimilar, but all profoundly influenced by these two, such as Shelley and Keats, Ruskin and Tennyson, Matthew Arnold and Browning, that Wordsworth's polemic is necessarily in part unreal to us except in a historic sense. We may know what 'gaudiness and inane phraseology' mean without travelling back out of the twentieth century; but we do not know quite what it meant to Wordsworth unless we know something of the typical verse of the eighteenth century, of the Popes without Pope's wit, the Johnsons without Johnson's vigour, the Grays without Gray's taste, the Cowpers without Cowper's sincerity. We have no lack of novels to which the expression 'frantic' might be applied, though 'silly' would perhaps characterize them better; but the sickly and stupid German tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse,' which moved Wordsworth to an unusually acrimonious tone, have long become invisible in the dark backward and abysm of time.

The positive part of Wordsworth's critical writings,

the statement of his principles, is far more important; but it raised so much discussion that it is out of the question to deal with it in any detail here. I must content myself with indicating a few of what seem to me the most important points, and with a word or two of caution against attributing to Wordsworth opinions which he never held.

At the same time it is necessary to keep in mind the fact that Wordsworth did not profess to put forward a system of 'Poetics,' but that his critical writings have almost all a direct reference to his own poetry and only to certain parts or aspects of that. "The majority of' the Lyrical Ballads are described in the Advertisement as 'experiments,' and that Advertisement, and the Preface of 1800 into which it grew, as well as the Appendix on Poetic Diction of 1802, are primarily and in their main intention an explanation of the principles upon which those experiments are based. They constitute, in essence, that plea for a 'return to Nature,' i.e. to truth and sincerity of thought and statement, of feeling and expression, which the liability of mankind to fall under the yoke of fashions and formulae evokes from all vigorous and independent writers. The Lyrical Ballads themselves triumphantly vindicated their existence; for it must be remembered that the very eagerness of the Edinburgh Reviewers and others to stamp out the infection of Wordsworth's style is a testimony, amply supported by the positive evidence of Coleridge and of the verse produced in

the early years of the nineteenth century, to the powerful influence which those poems exerted even from the first. The Apologia, therefore, of Wordsworth's prose was perhaps superfluous; but in relation to the Ballads to which it was intended to apply it was just, and justified by the success of the poems themselves.

If Wordsworth had known how much importance would be attached to his exposition of poetical principles and how much discussion would arise about them, he would probably have been more guarded in some of his expressions. Thus the Advertisement, after stating that the majority of the Lyrical Ballads were to be considered as experiments, proceeds:

They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure. Readers accustomed to the gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers, &c.

If this passage were taken in its natural sense, it would imply that the language of conversation in the upper class was different from that shared by the middle and lower classes; that it had hitherto been the exclusive language of poetry; and that it was frequently characterized by gaudiness and inane phraseology. Wordsworth, of course, meant nothing so ridiculous. He did not imagine that the peers, for instance, conversed in the language of Gray's Ode on

Spring. He was unconsciously attempting to say two things at once on the one hand, that the men and women of his ballads were drawn from the middle and lower classes; on the other, that his language was that of conversation. Accordingly in the Preface, substituted for the Advertisement, in the edition of 1800, he writes:

The principal object, then, proposed in these Poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible, in a selection of language really used by men.

But though the Preface removes an obvious confusion of language, it brings into relief a real confusion of thought. It is unnecessary here to discuss the subject in detail, as that has been done by Coleridge in a part of the Biographia Literaria which no reader of Wordsworth can afford to neglect. It is enough to point out that the two statements, with which Coleridge joined issue, and which cannot possibly be defended, were, one, to the effect that the language of men in humble and rustic life' had a special virtue as a vehicle of poetic thought from its own directness and from the unsophisticated character of such men (Pref. pp. 45, 48-49); the other, that there neither is, nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose and [that of] metrical composition."

Let us again remind ourselves that Wordsworth's theories take their start from the particular class

of poems of which the majority' of the Lyrical Ballads are specimens. Wordsworth was convinced that the language of poetry should be that of truth and sincerity, not a conventionally decorative jargon, and that the subject-matter of the noblest poetry should be neither the wild and fantastic absurdities or the pseudo-aristocratic inanities of fashionable romance, nor the highly artificial emotions and the narrowly rationalistic thought of the 'polite society,' which was bred on a degenerating tradition of the age of Anne, but the great and simple affections of our nature' (p. 50), or as he elsewhere expresses

it:

Of Truth, of Grandeur, Beauty, Love, and Hope,
And melancholy Fear subdued by Faith;
Of blessed consolations in distress;

Of moral strength, and intellectual Power;
Of joy in widest commonalty spread;
Of the individual Mind that keeps her own
Inviolate retirement, subject there

To Conscience only, and the law supreme
Of that Intelligence which governs all.

(From The Recluse, quoted in Pref. to Excursion.)

These convictions are illustrated in one branch of poetry by the Lyrical Ballads, just as we may say that the Virgilian point of view is exemplified by the Eclogues; but they are no less illustrated by the most splendid and elaborate of Wordsworth's poems, such as the famous Ode, the Lines written near Tintern Abbey, Laodamia, or the Sonnet on Westminster Bridge, or that On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic. Wordsworth had not trained