worth's famous theory to do with words in themselves that it may be questioned whether it fairly excludes the use of such a word as incommunicable in Margaret's lament,1 so often cited as an example of the inconsistency of his theory with his practice: Perhaps some dungeon hears thee groan, Or hast been summoned to the deep, This is not Margaret's language, the critics point out with glee, 'incommunicable' not being in that simple woman's vocabulary. But if the association of ideas is true and vital-if the words are a real expression of the mother's wistful thought: "They are asleep; but they cannot give their sleep to me or to any one'-then the curiosa felicitas of the adjective in this connection, its mournful sonority, its vague Shakespearean suggestions, have nothing to do with the matter. There is nothing implying wide experience or intellectual culture in Margaret's thought; it is one of those strange intuitive associations of ideas that come to children and poets and the simplest hearts. It is truly her method of expression, although the poet's vocabulary supplies the word. While this extension of the word language undoubtedly explains much of Wordsworth's criticism and practice, it cannot be asserted that he always used the term in this sense. In the Lyrical Ballads of 1798, in particular, he was deliberately imitating the speech of the lower classes, with all its peculiarities of vocabulary and syntax, as we shall see. He never could define his terms to the satisfaction of his friends., Coleridge did not know what he meant by 1 The Affliction of Margaret 50-56 (Oxford edition, p. 117). language; nor Crabb Robinson what he understood by imagination. Perhaps it was this conscious difficulty intranslating his own rather emotional and poetical thinking into the terms of the intellect that prevented him from writing more criticism. But in his use of the term language he was undoubtedly influenced also by a very interesting theory of Coleridge's. 3. The Universal Language of Poetry. This notion, which is mentioned in the Advertisement of 17981 as the opinion of the author of the Ancient Mariner, and is suggested in a footnote added in Coleridge's handwriting to the Preface of 1800, was probably the result of the reading of the ballads. Observing, with the possible help of Wordsworth, that the most ancient of these poems more nearly resembled the actual colloquial speech of 1797 than did the average verse of that year, Coleridge was led to the opinion that there is a permanent body of English words and idioms, denoting universal phenomena and experiences, which have remained comparatively unchanged since the time of Chaucer. This is the universal language of poetry, for it represents the permanent and changeless elements in human life. If we free the rustic speech from a few merely local elements, and the popular ballads from a very few archaisms, there remains much the same residuum; and the residuum proves, on examination, to be a 1 "The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere was professedly written in imitation of the style, as well as the spirit of the elder poets, but with a few exceptions, the Author believes that the language adopted there has been equally intelligible for three centuries.'-Advertisement to the Lyrical Ballads. 2 'It is worth while to observe that the affecting parts of Chaucer are almost always expressed in language pure and universally intelligible to this day.'-A Description of the Wordsworth and Coleridge MSS. in the Possession of Mr. T. Norton Longman, p. 19. See also Hazlitt, My First Acquaintance with the Poets (Literary Remains 2. 392). body of words common to Chaucer and to almost any Englishman of the year 1797. He who can use this concrete, emotional, and idiomatic speech with all the power of which it is capable has found the true and lasting Basis of poetic diction. This theory both Wordsworth and Coleridge tried to illustrate, but with one characteristic difference; for in the Ancient Mariner Coleridge contrives to retain a few romantic archaisms, and Wordsworth, in the Lyrical Ballads, keeps some special realistic features of the speech of the lower and middle classes of society. With The Ancient Mariner we are not here concerned. "But Wordsworth's effort must be carefully analyzed. CHAPTER 6. THE LYRICAL BALLADS. Although Wordsworth's theory of poetic diction had a sounder basis in literary tradition and in psychology than an ignorant world of letters was prepared to admit, his own application of it, in its first extreme form, was very limited in time and in extent. Only in the Advertisement to the Lyrical Ballads of 1798 does he say that he means to employ the 'language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society'; and only in this volume does he actually succeed in doing so. But even here he makes use of this language simply as an 'experiment,' and clearly indicates that the experiment applies only to a part-though a major part of the collection. The poems composing the minority, not included under Wordsworth's definition of his purpose, are easily determined. Apart from the contributions of Coleridge, and apart from Tintern Abbey, which, as Wordsworth himself indicates, was composed in the loftier and more impassioned strain of the ode,1 they prove to be the poems written before 1797-the Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree, The Female Vagrant, the Lines written near Richmond, and the Convict-none of which show any trace of the ballad-literature. One other poem in the volume shows virtually nothing of this influence. This is the Old Man Travelling, which occupies a unique place in the first edition. It is the only representative of a type of delineation of rustic life in blank verse which developed side by side with the Lyrical Ballads, but which does not otherwise appear in print till the volumes of 1800. The remaining poems in the first edition form a homogeneous group, clearly reflecting the 1 1 See note on Tintern Abbey in the Lyrical Ballads, 1802-1805, reprinted by Hutchinson in the Oxford edition, p. 901. literary influence suggested in the title, and the theory of poetic diction suggested in the Advertisement. They are the real experiment-the attempt to co-ordinate the artless art of the ballads with Wordsworth's own observation of the psychological processes underlying the speech of simple men; the rest are merely poems written in various moods and in various styles. This group of the true Lyrical Ballads falls into four main divisions: 1. Philosophical and narrative poems in the metre, and, to a certain extent, the style of the ballads, but wholly differing from them in substance. 2. (a) Philosophical and reflective poems, in which the narrative element is at a minimum: Lines written in Early Spring Lines written at a Small Distance from my House The Tables Turned. (b) Narrative poems in the nature of simple anecdotes designed to illustrate a philosophical truth that is far less simple: We are Seven Anecdote for Fathers Simon Lee. Narrative and lyrical poems, less recondite in thought, but written in a 'more impressive metre than is usual in the Ballads'1: 1 D (a) Poems more narrative than lyrical: Goody Blake and Harry Gill The Idiot Boy (Peter Bell). (b) Poems in which the lyrical element tends to pre 1 Preface, 1800, p. xxxv. |