reader. It was not a single isolated utterance. It had the wide background of English poetry and criticism for two centuries, and the narrower background of some very earnest literary experiment and study on the part, not of Wordsworth alone, but of an entire group of writers who were publishing in that open-minded periodical, The Monthly Magazine. Chief among these were Coleridge and Lamb. Not till we realize what Coleridge brought with him from Lamb to those memorable conversations in which the Lyrical Ballads originated do we begin to understand what was behind the curt sentences of the Advertisement of 1798.

It is not in their casual appearances in print that the most vital critical reflections of Wordsworth and Coleridge are to be sought, but in that remarkable oral discussion, begun by them in their long walks among the Quantock Hills, and continued day after day and year after year, not only by them, but by a larger circle, which included at various times Lamb, Southey, De Quincey, Hazlitt, Scott, Landor, and others. 'I have never felt inclined to write criticism,' said Wordsworth, though I have talked and am daily talking a great deal." And the echoes of this talk are everywhere heard in the criticism of the period-in Scott's edition of Dryden, in De Quincey's distinction between the literature of knowledge and the literature of power, which was originally Wordsworth's, in Coleridge's lectures, and later in chance remarks by Sara Coleridge and Aubrey de Vere. In order to understand the true relation of Wordsworth's criticism to his poetic creation, and to the literature of the past, we must, in imagination, continually supply this background of vivid conversation. And the beginnings of this are to be sought in the development of Wordsworth and Coleridge, in relation to their respective circles of friends and critics, long before they ever met.

1L. W. F. 3. 152.

Moreover, the reproduction of this background is particularly necessary because of the somewhat uncompromising tone of Wordsworth's formal criticism. Though his ideals were not wholly original, his personality was. What he took from without he translated into terms of his own experience, and converted to the substance of a peculiar and powerful nature—a nature unusually sensitive, and yet inflexible even to crudeness and awkwardness. Hence, since he always speaks from his own position, and does not easily adapt himself to an audience, it is necessary for his audience to adapt itself to him, and to discover in each case what is behind his utterances.

This is what has been attempted in this study. Accepting the poet's own declaration that any one who cares to study the matter will see that his principles are in accordance with the best traditions of English literature, I have begun with a review of the theories of poetic diction in England before the time of Wordsworth. Then, in the light of this study, and of such scanty evidence as we possess, I have tried to reconstruct the processes of critical thought which were responsible for the experiment of the Lyrical Ballads, and to show exactly how this thought affected his style-his vocabulary, his syntax, and his rhetorical devices--then and afterwards. And this I have done in the belief that his criticism and his practice are mutually illustrative, and that both, even in their exaggerations and possible mistakes, are of supreme value for the art of English poetry.

CHAPTER 1.

POETIC DICTION IN 'OUR ELDER POETS.'

A great poet must create or recreate, not only the taste by which he is enjoyed, but the language in which he writes. Like all artists, he must inform a medium already developed by others with the new spirit and the new life within him, thereby renewing and modifying the outward form also. But, unlike other artists, he derives his medium from two sources-from the written words of poets, who have thoughtfully adapted it to the purposes of beauty and delight, and from the lips of his daily associates, who have made a swift and haphazard adaptation of it to the purposes of immediate utility. Between these two-the writ-✔ ten and the oral tradition-the poet, 'singing a song in which all other human beings join with him," must make his own synthesis, so that the artist and the plowman may both hear the message, each in his own tongue.

Of this duty the inheritors of the fertile English tongue have never been wholly neglectful. But their efforts have been complicated by a certain individualism in the English character. The Englishman, whether poet or plowman, likes to speak as he chooses. Between the characteristic phraseology of bards who invented their own language, and a rich popular speech, fond of short cuts, and uncritically hospitable to new locutions, the plain and open path of a generally intelligible and beautiful poetic diction has not always been easy to find. Nevertheless, it was not for want of self-criticism, and the unremitting efforts of many

1A remark attributed by Wordsworth to Coleridge. It is quoted, in slightly different forms, in the famous letter to Lady Beaumont (May 21, 1807: Wordsworth's Literary Criticism, p. 47), and in the Essay Supplementary to the Preface.

2 Preface to Lyrical Ballads (in a passage added to the original preface in 1802).

generations, that the typical English style seemed to Matthew Arnold wilful, barbarous, and violent. So it had seemed to the most delicate spirits of Elizabethan England, wistfully looking to polished Italy and ancient Rome, and to their own well of English undefiled in Chaucer, and in the light of those standards discovering in their contemporary style some want of measure and grace. So it had seemed to the poets of the eighteenth century, scorning the rich and various language into which this Elizabethan diction had flowered as a luxuriant wildwood growth, which it was their task to reduce to French correctness and elegance. So it had seemed to Wordsworth, in whose eyes the effort of a century had resulted only in a phraseology so gaudy and 'licentious,' so lacking in the naturalness and good sense which had been constantly preached, that the discovery of a standard of expression which would protect the reader from the caprice of the poet seemed a matter of immediate and paramount importance.1

The most powerful and original of all these efforts was that of Wordsworth; yet its originality consisted, not in the creation of a new ideal of poetic diction, but in the vitality with which he informed an old one. Wordsworth was not the first to seek his poetic diction in a selection of the real language of men, as opposed to a traditional literary dialect. Chaucer had done it before, and Chaucer's master, Dante; and the method of Chaucer had remained the accepted one in English poetry, consciously imitated by Spenser, and received by others from Chaucer's own source the vernacular literatures of the Continent, especially the Italian and French. Indeed, the modern poetry of Europe, in every tongue, is the result of a choice similar to that of Wordsworth on the part of poets, when Latin was still the speech of the cultivated. In England a power

1Cf. Bagehot, Literary Studies 2. 389: 'A dressy literature, an exaggerated literature, seem to be fated to us; these are our curses.'