1

“I am myself,” said Wordsworth, “one of the happiest of men; and no man who does not partake of that happiness, who lives a life of constant bustle, and whose felicity depends on the opinions of others, can possibly comprehend the best of my poems.” It was thus that he delivered himself on 8 May, 1812, to Henry Crabb Robinson: and it is a good example of the frightening and repellent self-assurance with which Wordsworth contemplated the fact and the nature of his own genius, and communicated his sense of these to others. But this need not mean that Wordsworth was self-deluded, that there was nothing to contemplate, or that what was there was something different from what Wordsworth saw. It will be the contention of this essay that Wordsworth knew the facts of his own genius better than anyone.

It is remarkable, to begin with, how readily Wordsworth proceeds to oppose his happiness, or his own sense of it, to “a life of constant bustle”. Did it not occur to him that many men experience a quite genuine happiness precisely in “bustle”, in a sense of purposeful activity around them, in the changing spectacles of energetic life? Apparently not; and this from the first tells us something about Wordsworth's sort of happiness. It expressed itself in stillness and silence:

I was glad to accompany the Wordsworths to the British Museum. I had to wait for them in the ante-room, and we had at last but a hurried survey of the antiquities. I did not perceive that Wordsworth much enjoyed the Elgin Marbles; but he is a still man when he does enjoy himself, and by no means ready to talk of his pleasure, except to his sister.¹

“He is a still man when he does enjoy himself.” And so are the people in his poems, like the Idiot Boy, who was “idle all for very joy”. We shall go some way towards understanding how Wordsworth's personal happiness goes into his poems, as he asserted it did, if we begin by noticing, as many have done already, how often silence and immobility are the distinguishing features of the personages he introduces into his poems. This connection is forced upon the attentive reader with particular vividness by what is the profoundest response to this aspect of Wordsworth the man as he was known to his contemporaries. This is Benjamin Robert Haydon's account of how he took a cast of Wordsworth's face:

I had a cast made yesterday of Wordsworth's face. He bore it like a philosopher. John Scott was to meet him at breakfast, and just as he came in the plaster was put on. Wordsworth was sitting in the other room in my dressing-grown, with his hands folded, sedate, solemn and still. I stepped in to Scott and told him as a curiosity to take a peep, that he might say the first sight he ever had of so great a poet was in this stage towards immortality.

I opened the door slowly, and there he sat innocent and unconscious of our plot, in mysterious stillness and silence.²

“Solemn and still …”, “mysterious stillness and silence …”: these are the very terms in which Wordsworth himself characteristically offers for contemplation his own most important human figures, such as the Idiot Boy, Michael, the Leech-Gatherer. And Haydon's prose, here bringing out the symbolic reverberations of a commonplace and accidental situation, is already half-way to poetry.

But Haydon goes on:

When he was relieved he came in to breakfast with his usual cheerfulness and delighted us with his bursts of inspiration. At one time he shook us both in explaining the principles of his system, his views of man, and his object in writing.

Wordsworth's faculty is in describing those far-reaching and intense feelings and glimmerings and doubts and fears and hopes of man, as referring to what he might be before he was born or what he may be hereafter.

He is a great being and will hereafter be ranked as one who had a portion of the spirit of the mighty ones, especially Milton, but who did not possess the power of using that spirit otherwise than with reference to himself and so as to excite a reflex action only: this is, in my opinion, his great characteristic.

Haydon's testimony is uniquely valuable in thus proceeding, though by an associative rather than logical link, from the stillness of Wordsworth the man to the stillness of his poetry. For that is what it amounts to, this “reflex action only”: the conspicuous lack in Wordsworth of any dramatic feeling, the way his insights never express themselves in terms of energetic action or of steadily suspenseful events developing out of an initial situation. It is clear that this feature of Wordsworth's work, whether we interpret it as a limitation or merely a distinguishing characteristic, was a commonplace in the circles which Haydon and Robinson and (less constantly) Wordsworth himself frequented. It is what lies behind Keats's famous judgment about “the egotistical sublime”,³ and there is obviously a close relationship between this and Hazlitt's remarks in The Spirit of the Age:

Those persons who look upon Mr Wordsworth as a merely puerile writer, must be rather at a loss to account for his strong predilection for such geniuses as Dante and Michelangelo. We do not think our author has any very cordial sympathy with Shakespear. How should he? Shakespear was the least of an egotist of any body in the world.⁴

Plainly, in this curiously left-handed compliment, the word “egotist” is meant to convey a sense of Wordsworth's incapacity for the dramatist's feat of sinking his own personality in those of his creations. And this is one of the places where the relationship is clearest between Hazlitt and Keats, who in his letters expatiated on the judgments here passed by implication on both Wordsworth and Shakespeare. Similarly, the whole Keatsian doctrine of “negative capability”, as exemplified especially by Shakespeare, must be related to what Hazlitt says of the latter in his Lectures on the English Poets.

Less obviously related but more arresting is a Shelleyan judgment which puts him in the same camp. This is expressed in four acute and crucial stanzas from Peter Bell the Third (Part the Fourth):

He had a mind which was somehow
          At once circumference and centre
Of all he might or feel or know;
Nothing went ever out, although
          Something did ever enter.
He had as much imagination
          As a pint-pot;—he never could
Fancy another situation,
From which to dart his contemplation,
          Than that wherein he stood.
Yet his was individual mind,
          And new-created all he saw
In a new manner, and refined
Those new creations, and combined
Them, by a master-spirit's law.
Thus—though unimaginative—
          An apprehension clear, intense,
Of his mind's work, had made alive
The things it wrought on; I believe
          Wakening a sort of thought in sense.(5)

The imagination which Shelley here denies to Wordsworth is specifically the dramatic imagination. “Nothing went ever out although / Something did ever enter”—this limiting judgment is as just as the wonderful compliment, “wakening a sort of thought in sense”. And it is worth pondering. It is not just that The Borderers, while it has an interesting and important theme and contains distinguished writing, is yet, by common consent, an unsuccessful drama. Whenever Wordsworth essays the dramatic monologue, writing in character, as in the notorious case of “The Thorn”, the effect, as Coleridge pointed out, is disastrous. And to go further again, to that loose sense of “dramatic” which covers the contrivance of tense situations and logical development of plot in narrative, it will be generally allowed that here too Wordsworth is deficient. The plot of “The Idiot Boy”, for instance, is illogical and arbitrary—unforgivably so, were it not that Wordsworth, humorously and arrogantly, makes it clear that his perfunctory handling of it is deliberate. For Wordsworth was aware of this peculiarity in himself, and as usual stood over it without apology. Admitting the absence from his poetry of the interest, for the reader or spectator, of dramatic conflict and crisis, he throws down the gauntlet:

then let him see if there are no victories in the world of spirit, no changes, no commotions, no revolutions there, no fluxes and refluxes of the thoughts which may be made interesting by modest combination with the stiller actions of the bodily frame.⁶

Let Wordsworth's own word “stiller”, applied with characteristic arrogance to the eventful world of dramatic action, stand as one more proof that the peculiarity of Wordsworth's imagination, the way it resists dramatic embodiment, is related to his being “a still man when he does enjoy himself”. And it is a real peculiarity, for of no earlier poet of comparable stature by common consent (Chaucer, Dante, Milton, not to speak of Shakespeare) is it true to anything the same extent. Presumably it does not seem so odd to later generations of Wordsworthians as to the first one, simply because we have ceased since then to expect the great poetic imagination to express itself dramatically, and hence objectively. Perhaps one way to define the Romantic movement would be to call it that change in artistic sensibility which substituted the reflective or the ruminative for the dramatic imagination.

2

De Quincey shows one way of getting into Wordsworth's poems by way of the avenue he himself indicated: his happiness, his capacity for joy. De Quincey says finely:

Whoever looks searchingly into the characteristic genius of Wordsworth, will see that he does not willingly deal with a passion in its direct aspect, or presenting an unmodified contour, but in forms more complex and oblique, and when passing under the shadow of some secondary passion. Joy, for instance, that wells up from constitutional sources, joy that is ebullient from youth to age, and cannot cease to sparkle, he yet exhibits in the person of Matthew, the village schoolmaster, as touched and overgloomed by memories of sorrow. In the poem of “We are Seven,” which brings into day for the first time a profound fact in the abysses of human nature—viz. that the mind of an infant cannot admit the idea of death, cannot comprehend it, any more than the fountain of light can comprehend the aboriginal darkness …—the little mountaineer, who furnishes the text for this lovely strain, she whose fullness of life could not brook the gloomy faith in a grave, is yet (for the effect upon the reader) brought into connexion with the reflex shadows of the grave; and if she herself has not, the reader has, and through this very child, the gloom of that contemplation obliquely irradiated, as raised in relief upon his imagination, even by her. That same infant, which subjectively could not tolerate death, being by the reader contemplated objectively, flashes upon us the tenderest images of death. Death and its sunny antipole are forced into connexion.⁷

This account of “We are Seven” is just, and central to my argument. But as De Quincey says, it is only a particular instance of something that is generally true of Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads, in which “joy that is ebullient” is constantly being “overgloomed by memories of sorrow”. The necessity of this for Wordsworth, and its attraction for him, is well but teasingly expressed (to take a further instance) in a stanza from his “Anecdote for Fathers”:

A day it was when I could bear
Some fond regrets to entertain;
With so much happiness to spare,
I could not feel a pain.(8)

The poem tells how Wordsworth walked out with a five-year-old boy at Liswyn farm, and found himself, while relishing to the full the attractions of that place, regretting that it had not also the beauties of a seaside-place which he calls “Kilve”.⁹ It is most important to take the force of Wordsworth's explanation of this. It is not the trite observation that joy unalloyed is no part of man's lot. Nor is it that man necessarily manipulates his emotions to bring about a more piquant taste, as for instance the enervated enthusiasts of the sensibility cult would roll their feelings on the tongue, to produce “grateful tears, delicious sorrow”. No; it is, as De Quincey saw, the very “ebullience” of natural joy which brims over into regret. The phenomenon is of superabundant feeling, not enervation; as the quoted stanza says.

And this, too, is what the poem says. The poet presses the boy to admit that he shares the same sort of ambiguous feeling; and, when he admits it, he badgers him to know how he explains it. The boy resists, until at last:

His head he raised—there was in sight,
It caught his eye, he saw it plain—
Upon the house-top, glittering bright,
A broad and gilded vane.
Then did the boy his tongue unlock,
And eased his mind with this reply:
“At Kilve there was no weather-cock;
And that's the reason why.”(10)

If we have not taken the point of the earlier stanza, we shall miss the poignancy in the boy's artlessness. The point is not the child's inability to see things in adult perspective, so that to him the presence or absence of a weather-vane over-rides all other considerations. Wordsworth precludes this by making the boy say he preferred the other place because it hadn't a weather-vane, not because it had. Wordsworth does not invite us to adult condescension. We are not to say, “Oh, how sweet!” On the contrary, we have to see that the adult and the child are at one; that the boy, like the man, is enjoying himself so much that he can afford, and deliberately seeks out, some regret for which there is no objective reason. Pressed by the grown-up to find a reason, he fobs him off with a weather-vane: but he does not deceive himself, and as it happens he does not deceive the poet, though he deceives some readers. The pathos in the close derives from our compassionate realisation that the child feels the same complex emotion as the man, and is even less able to explain it to himself. And yet that's not right either; for, left to himself, the boy would feel no need to account for it. Hence:

O dearest, dearest boy! my heart
For better lore would seldom yearn,
Could I but teach the hundredth part
Of what from thee I learn.(11)

What the poet has learned is not to badger other people, and still more not to badger himself, to find reasons for feeling as he does; what he has to do is to feel thus and thus, and trust the feeling.

On no other reading is there justification for those lines which seem at first so deplorable:

His head he raised—there was in sight,
It caught his eye, he saw it plain—

This is not inexcusable padding-out, saying one simple thing three ways; it is daring. Pressed and fussed by the probing elder, the boy's eyes have a hunted look; and casting about in desperation, his eye lights upon the weather-cock. The lines convey brilliantly how his eye flits across the weather-cock, returns to it, and then, seeing it will do for a pretext, focuses on it.

Even so, Wordsworth had more in hand than the evoking of a pathos, however poignant. De Quincey in another fine passage emphasises that the best of the Lyrical Ballads are genuine discoveries about human sentiment. Wordsworth was exploring unmapped territories, and coming home with treasure-trove. The realisation that in the child's mind, as in the man's, abundant elation could express itself in illogical regret—this was such a discovery. Its importance, for Wordsworth as perhaps for us, can be brought home if we see it in the context of the cult of sensibility in the late eighteenth century, and the special sort of sentimentality it produced. One most marked feature of that cult, perhaps the central motive behind it, was a consuming interest in ambiguous emotional states. Sterne and Richardson, who had more important matters on hand, nevertheless could be (and were) excerpted and bowdlerised in order to nourish this appetite. One finds it everywhere in the minor poetry of Wordsworth's time and a little earlier. It is for instance the point of Samuel Rogers' verses “On a Tear”. It is in the very title of James Montgomery's appallingly vulgar poem, “The Joy of Grief”:

'Tis the solemn feast of feeling,
          'Tis the Sabbath of the soul.

Or else we recognise it very readily in the elegiac form, as with John Logan:

Nor will I court Lethean streams,
          The sorrowing sense to steep;
Nor drink oblivion of the themes
          On which I love to weep.

We are accustomed to regard this sort of thing as vicious, and there can be little doubt that Wordsworth would have agreed. The ambiguous feeling that concerns him in “Anecdote for Fathers” is something different, though it looks the same. As De Quincey noticed, Wordsworth himself defined the difference, insisting that the one sort of ambiguity is the effect of ebullience, the other, of enervation. The same distinction had to be made, in the same situation, by a writer concerned with ancient Greek literature:

Is pessimism inevitably a sign of decadence, warp, weakened instincts, as it was once with the ancient Hindus, as it is now with us modern Europeans? Or is there such a thing as a strong pessimism? … Could it be, perhaps, that the very feeling of superabundance created its own kind of suffering: a temerity of penetration, hankering for the enemy … so as to prove its strength … ?¹²

The same strange attitude is defined, with equal precision, in the “Lines written in Early Spring”:

I heard a thousand blended notes,
While in a grove I sate reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.(13)

Again we misread if we think that the joy and peace of “nature” remind the poet by contrast of the turbulence of man. This is not a scene, “Where every prospect pleases and only man is vile.” For both “pleasant thoughts” and “sad thoughts” are comprised in “that sweet mood”. It is a case, once again, of joy brimming over from its first motive into thoughts which, to the reason, are joyless. This is not, I think, forced quite home in this poem, but we need it to explain the jaunty movement, which seems so much at odds with the poet's assertion that he has “reason to lament / What man has made of man.” This jaunty movement is characteristic of the Lyrical Ballads and, more than any peculiarities in the diction, is what unsettles the reader in “Simon Lee” and “The Last of the Flock”. It is in any case easy to point out the faults in both diction and metre which ruin these poems (though both, incidentally, have fine moments). And when we seek to generalise these failures, we usually do so by reference to Wordsworth's theory of diction. But that, it may be, is a red herring which Wordsworth drew across Coleridge's path and ours. And in any case to lay the blame there is not to generalise far enough. These failures among the Lyrical Ballads could be explained by supposing that in these poems Wordsworth tried for, and failed to achieve, this same tone of almost lunatic elation in which “pleasant thoughts / Bring sad thoughts to the mind”. Wordsworth's word for this state, or one of his words, is “glee”; and it is possible to regard all the Lyrical Ballads as experiments in expressing glee and/or investigations of that state.

Wordsworth said of “The Idiot Boy”, “I never wrote anything with so much glee”. And in fact, for the effect of this splendid poem, “glee” is the exact word. The poet writes with glee, and the principal figure is the incarnation of glee:

But when the Pony moved his legs,
Oh! then for the poor Idiot Boy!
For joy he cannot hold the bridle,
For joy his head and heels are idle,
He's idle all for very joy.
And, while the Pony moves his legs,
In Johnny's left hand you may see
The green bough motionless and dead:
The Moon that shines above his head
Is not more still and mute than he.
His heart it was so full of glee
That, till full fifty yards were gone,
He quite forgot his holly whip,
And all his skill in horsemanship:
Oh! happy, happy, happy John.(14)

And yet the subject is one that is, or ought to be, extremely painful—an idiot boy is not normally a pleasant or reassuring spectacle. What redeems the image, for the poet and for the reader, is the stillness, the muteness, the idleness.

The idleness should send us back to “Expostulation and Reply” and “The Tables Turned”, where the poet is accused of idleness by the old schoolmaster, Matthew. He replies:

The eye—it cannot choose but see;
We cannot bid the ear be still;
Our bodies feel, where'er they be,
Against or with our will.
Nor less I deem that there are Powers
Which of themselves our minds impress;
That we can feed this mind of ours
In a wise passiveness. … ;(15)

and in the second poem:

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.(16)

These are famous lines which we try to read with due solemnity, however their doctrine may outrage us. But perhaps we give them more solemnity than is due. For put them back in their contexts, and willy-nilly they read jauntily, trippingly. It will not do to decide that these stanzas are saying in another way what is said in “Tintern Abbey”. It is the other way of saying that is important. The bearing and sense of these lines, when abstracted from them, may be identical with the bearing of some lines in “Tintern Abbey”, but these differ from those in being informed with glee, carried on the back of that lunatic elation which Wordsworth was at some pains to define, if only by rhythm—and never better than by the helter-skelter stumbling rhythms of “The Idiot Boy”.

Wordsworth was the Idiot Boy. Consider these lines given to the idiot, lines from which, so Wordsworth says, the whole poem evolved:

The cocks did crow to-whoo, to-whoo,
And the sun did shine so cold!(17)

This piercing shrillness can be described only by repeating what Matthew, in “Expostulation and Reply”, is made to say to Wordsworth:

You look round on your Mother Earth,
As if she for no purpose bore you;
As if you were her first-born birth,
And none had lived before you!(18)

The idiot, seeing the moon and hearing the owls, is Adam on the first night after Creation.

It is the same with the other lunatic of the Lyrical Ballads, the mad mother of “Her Eyes are Wild”:

“Sweet babe! they say that I am mad,
But nay, my heart is far too glad;
And I am happy when I sing
Full many a sad and doleful thing; …”(19)

What sort of sad things could thus be sung in high glee? What, but “The Idiot Boy” or “Goody Blake and Harry Gill”? Except for the “Tintern Abbey” lines, all Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads are either analyses of the state of glee (as are “Expostulation and Reply” and “Anecdote for Fathers”) or else expressions of that glee (as are “Goody Blake and Harry Gill” and “The Idiot Boy”).

To be sure, it should now be clear that the sort of enjoyment called glee, no less the “happiness” to which Wordsworth laid prescriptive claim, are something different from what normally goes under those names. If a definition is required beyond that furnished by Wordsworth's poems, one may go to S. T. Coleridge as recorded by E. H. Coleridge:

He (Coleridge) called it joy, meaning thereby not mirth or high spirits, or even happiness, but a consciousness of entire and therefore well being when the emotional and intellectual faculties are in equipoise.

This carries special weight as the contribution of a poet, who, in Dejection: An Ode, showed himself ready to put as high a price on this state as Wordsworth did. It was because Coleridge thought it impossible he would ever experience this state anew, that he seems to have thought that his career as a poet was over.

The ass, the idiot, the moon, the owls—these motifs from “The Idiot Boy” recur in Wordsworth's poems of 1799. There is the ass in Peter Bell; there are owls in the lines beginning, “There was a Boy; ye knew him well, ye cliffs”; the moon figures with appalling effect in the “Lucy” poem, “Strange fits of passion have I known”; and Ruth, deserted by her lover, becomes a harmless lunatic. What is more, it is clear that all these images retain, for Wordsworth, the symbolic force he gave them in “The Idiot Boy”. Wordsworth says comically that he studied the habits of asses before he wrote Peter Bell; but it was a sort of study which strove to learn what was the meaning of the ass, not what it looked like or how it behaved. In the same way, the owls:

                    And they would shout
Across the watery vale, and shout again,
Responsive to his call,—with quivering peals,
And long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud
Redoubled and redoubled; concourse wild
Of jocund din!(20)

This “jocund din” is what no one else, no previous poet and surely no reader, has ever heard in the calling of owls. It is not one of Wordsworth's discoveries, which we can corroborate, once the fact has been pointed out. The owls have a symbolic force, or none. Surely, then, the “jocund din” is another version of that lunatic glee with which, stock-still in silence, the Idiot Boy heard the owls, and with which Wordsworth conceived him doing so.

In the “Lucy” poem, the symbolic function of the moon is insisted on:

My horse moved on; hoof after hoof
He raised, and never stopped:
When down behind the cottage roof,
At once, the bright moon dropped.
What fond and wayward thoughts will slide
Into a Lover's head!
“O mercy!” to myself I cried,
“If Lucy should be dead!”(21)

The connexion between the obscuring of the moon and the death of a girl remains mysterious. The irrationality of it is pressed upon our attention.

But it can be rationalised without much trouble. Coleridge, in Germany with the Wordsworths at the time this poem was written, wrote to Thomas Poole:

There are moments in which I have such power of life in me, such a conceit of it, I mean, that I lay the blame of my child's death on my absence.²²

Coleridge was just emerging from his Berkeleyan phase, and the brilliant Berkeleyan paradox, esse est percipi, had led him to wonder how we could know that anything existed except in those moments when the mind perceived it. In his letter he takes the further step of speculating why, if the movements of the mind can thus annihilate whatever is out of mind, the movements of the body (from England to Germany, for instance) should not have the same power. Similarly, in Wordsworth's marvellous poem, the movements of the poet's body astride his horse make the moon drop out of sight and therefore (by Berkeleyan logic) out of existence; and if the movements of the body are thus capable of snuffing out the moon, why should they not snuff out a life, or, if the body has this power, must we not suppose the mind has equal power, such that, if you cease to think of a person, that person dies? We know from the famous note which Wordsworth dictated to the “Immortality Ode,” that he was capable of such an “abyss of idealism”. Moreover, if we recall Coleridge's definition of joy (“a consciousness of entire and therefore well being”), or Wordsworth's definition of the poet (“a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him”), we realise that when Coleridge writes of “such power of life in me, such a conceit of it”, he is talking of joy or glee. And thus, Wordsworth's poem about Lucy turns once again upon the central theme of joy, and expresses in fact one of those “fond regrets” which, “with so much happiness to spare”, the mind can bear, and delights, to entertain.

Common to all the treatments of glee is the silence and immobility of the chief actor. The Idiot Boy goes “Burr-burr” and the teeth of Harry Gill “chatter-chatter”, but these sounds seem even further from human speech than silence would be. They only define the inhuman silence into which erupt, with piercing effect, the hooting of owls and the braying of donkeys. As for immobility, Charles Williams noticed long ago its mysterious attraction for Wordsworth in such later poems as “Resolution and Independence” and “Michael”. It is already present, as a potent force, in 1798; the Idiot Boy throughout, and Peter Bell after his criminal fury with the ass, and the horseman of the “Lucy” poem, are immobile without being statuesque. None of them ride their mounts, for they do not guide them: they sit idle and immobile upon the animal's back, rapt in glee. “Idle” is one of Wordsworth's words in this period, and he seems to see it, not as in reality it most commonly appears, as an aimless toying and fussing, but as a state of relaxed immobility.

3

The reader who has noticed this, though subconsciously, will not be surprised at a new feature of the poems of 1799, a recurrent concern with the fact of death. A corpse is silent and motionless, as Peter Bell was, and the Idiot Boy. What more natural than for Wordsworth to start wondering where the difference was, between this life and this death? It is as if Wordsworth, having repeatedly demanded a specially high value for rapt and silent immobility, should have a voice protest: “Why, this that you value so highly—what is it but being half-dead?” “Half-dead” is precise; for idiots are only half-alive. And Wordsworth turns to deal with the heckler. In the passive absorption of glee, a man is rapt out of time as the dead are out of time.

Wordsworth answers his heckler in two ways. On the one hand he seems to say: “Yes, death is a state of permanent glee. And death is therefore good.” And he says the same thing, but subjectively, when he seems to say: “Yes, my glee is so abundant that I can regard even death with joy.” The joy that spills over and transforms sad thoughts can now transform even thoughts of death. When Wordsworth's expression is at its most concentrated and masterly, he says both these things together:

A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.(23)

The boy who called to the owls died young, but there is no implication that this was cause for sorrow, any more than the death of Lucy:

Thus Nature spake—The work was done—
How soon my Lucy's race was run!
She died, and left to me
The memory of what has been,
And never more will be.(24)

This is much truer to the experience (to judge from the appropriately trance-like melody, as from the logic of the situation) than is that other version of Lucy's death:

But she is in her grave, and, oh,
          The difference to me!(25)

It is possible to hear the rhythm in these lines as gleeful, tripping. If we hear it in this way, we can hardly believe what the verses say. And we shall prefer to believe other, more honest poems, which seem to say that it makes next to no difference at all. Wordsworth is indifferent, since death and life can be equally gleeful, as in “The Danish Boy”:

For calm and gentle is his mien;
Like a dead Boy he is serene.(26)

Wordsworth does not care whether the Danish Boy is a live boy or a dead ghost; in either case, he is “glee”. Nor does he care about “Lucy Gray”:

Yet some maintain that to this day
She is a living child;
That you may see sweet Lucy Gray
Upon the lonesome wild.
O'er rough and smooth she trips along,
And never looks behind;
And sings a solitary song
That whistles in the wind.(27)

Are the boy and girl both ghosts? The possibility is not brought in as a piece of fabulous machinery. It is to that suggestion Wordsworth conducts us, just to emphasise how little the possibility disturbs him. Alive or dead, their existence is joy. They represent a mode of being to which the question of life or death as normally conceived is irrelevant.

At the same time as Wordsworth probes this new vein, of the connexion between glee, or natural joy, and death, he probes and extends an old vein, trying to define what this “glee” is, to establish the conditions most favourable for it, and to distinguish it from perversions or vicious imitations.

Wordsworth repeats the definition he gave in “Anecdote for Fathers”; glee is a state in which abundant joy spills over and transforms trains of feeling normally not joyful at all. In the fragment “Nutting”, the objects on to which joy spills over are merely “indifferent”:

In that sweet mood when pleasure loves to pay
Tribute to ease; and, of its joy secure,
The heart luxuriates with indifferent things,
Wasting its kindliness on stocks and stones,
And on the vacant air.(28)

But the old ambiguity re-appears in its original form, with “The Danish Boy”:

The lovely Danish Boy is blest
And happy in his flowery cove:
From bloody deeds his thoughts are far;
And yet he warbles songs of war,
That seem like songs of love,
For calm and gentle is his mien;
Like a dead Boy he is serene.(29)

If we ask why, when “from bloody deeds his thoughts are far”, the boy none the less “warbles songs of war”, and why, when warbled, they “seem like songs of love”, the only answer is the one we gave when the mad mother unaccountably found happiness singing “many a sad and doleful thing”. Their consciousness of the richness of their own being is such that they deliberately seek out what is inimical to it, so as to transform it out of their own resources.

On the other hand, Wordsworth greatly extends his conception of “glee”, for it now seems elastic enough to include the state of mind of the Old Cumberland Beggar, or that defined in the related fragment, “Animal Tranquillity and Decay”. The connexion is in the term “tranquillity”, but it is brought home in a stanza of “Three years she grew in sun and shower”:

She shall be sportive as the fawn
That wild with glee across the lawn,
Or up the mountain springs;
And her's shall be the breathing balm,
And her's the silence and the calm
Of mute insensate things.(30)

The wildly sportive and the mutely insensate are alike manifestations of a glee which expresses itself as readily in a breathing silence as in wild activity. Or again, the connexion is made in the fine poems on Matthew, “The grey-haired man of glee”. For if glee is a state in which joy spills over into thoughts of sadness, we observe from Matthew's case that old age is naturally gleeful; for the joy of animal tranquillity in Matthew turns to sad thoughts of those near to him whom he has out-lived. To survive contemporaries and juniors is sad, and yet few will consider it a matter of regret to have that evidence of the power of life in one's self. (It is a fine stroke, incidentally, to make Matthew rebuff the poet's offer to take the place of his dead sons; for he is in a state of animal tranquillity, in which there can be no substitute for the animal passions of the blood-tie.)

Of course the state of mind of the principal figure is not the centre of interest in “The Old Cumberland Beggar”. This is the first of the poems which asks, in respect of glee, what are the conditions in which glee can flourish; and the conditions in question are social conditions. This poem, therefore, like the other long narratives (“The Brothers” and, in its way, “Michael”), expresses Wordsworth's view of the good society, the right social philosophy. In fact, it was occasioned by specific enactments for the relief of the indigent, and was sent to Charles James Fox, with a very bold and reasoned letter on the state of the poor laws.

Wordsworth's originality is not in choosing a subject such as a country beggar, but in making the light fall on him from an unforeseen angle. For he is concerned with acts and habits of charity not as they affect the recipient of alms, but as they affect the alms giver—a concern foreshadowed in the last stanza of “Simon Lee”.³¹ The “moral” of “The Old Cumberland Beggar” (our squeamishness demands the quotation-marks round “moral”, though Wordsworth would have seen no need for them) is that the old beggar was invaluable for cementing together in a common responsibility a community otherwise loosely knit. As Martin Buber has said, “A community is where community happens.” And Wordsworth's poem has the effect of stressing that proper use of the word as denoting a spiritual fellowship, bound together in habitual disciplines of usage and unwritten law. This Burkean view of society as bound together by unwritten law and not by paper constitutions, coming so early in Wordsworth and so plainly in keeping with the whole tenor of his thought, serves to show how, despite his generous fellow-feeling with the French revolutionaries, his political outlook was innately conservative; and accordingly the charge that he was a political renegade loses most of its point. These habitual disciplines of custom and unformulated precedent are part of what Wordsworth was later to praise and examine as “natural piety”.

Both “The Brothers” and “Michael” look rather different from this point of view. In the former poem, the younger brother, James, personifies glee:

And many, many happy days were his …(32)

(The line as it stands is commonplace, but in the context, not just of this poem but of others, the “happiness” carries weight.) Glee is possible to James Ewbank because, no less than the Cumberland Beggar, he is the responsibility of the whole rural community:

He was the child of all the dale—he lived
Three months with one, and six months with another,
And wanted neither food, nor clothes, nor love; …(33)

The poem revolves around the uncertainty of Leonard, the elder brother, whether James is alive or dead. With him, as with the other personifications of glee, it is hard to tell. And it is magnificently appropriate that in the end it should appear that James died while sleep-walking, for this narrows still further the gap between life and death in the case of existences so fortunate as his. Equally ingenious and masterly is the device by which Leonard's uncertainty is made plausible, that is, the habit in the dale-village community of burying the dead without headstones or other means of identification. The whole community partakes of the idyllic life of glee, and the community's refusal to identify their dead exemplifies this people's difficulty in separating the dead from the living, and their indifference about it. (It is “We are Seven” all over again.) The wandering brother, outside the community and déraciné, cannot share this indifference. He is shut out from glee and its concomitant, animal tranquillity. So in the end, oppressed and sorrowful, he leaves the dale for a second and final time. Those who regard Wordsworth as a proto-Victorian figure would do well to ponder this figure of Leonard Ewbank, and the doom that Wordsworth reserves for him. He has all the virtues of Smiles's self-help: independence, pride, resourcefulness, energy, courage. Not for him the solution that his weaker brother embraces—of living on charity. Yet it is the weak who inherit Wordsworth's earth. And indeed the praise of idleness, of idleness as a duty, should have prepared us: if the early Wordsworth is a Tory, he is a Tory anarchist. But all this was changed after the “Ode to Duty”.

Wordsworth's blank-verse in “The Brothers” is quite undistinguished, and barely adequate: but the poem is a great one because of the invention, the masterly conduct and disposition of the fable.³⁴ If this is bitter medicine to swallow in an age which believes that poetry exists in diction and nowhere else, this is not Wordsworth's fault.

The same is true of “Michael”, even though the verse as such is a little better, and in particular gets off to a better start. (At this period, Wordsworth's attempts to “lead in” to his subject are lamentable, and the first lines of “The Brothers” are especially disastrous; this is a particular case of Wordsworth's lack of dramatic imagination in even the loosest sense.) “The Brothers” and “Michael” are really very similar. In the first poem, one brother stays in the dale and benefits from the communal discipline of glee, while the other leaves the dale and the community, thereafter unable to return; in the second poem, a father stays in the dale and within the community, exhibiting the animal tranquillity which is glee's counterpart or other aspect, while his son leaves never to return. If in these broad terms the poems treat of an identical situation, within this frame occur other situations which are identical:

They had an uncle;—he was at that time
A thriving man, and trafficked on the seas:
And, but for that same uncle, to this hour
Leonard had never handled rope or shroud;
For the boy loved the life which we lead here;
And though of unripe years, a stripling only,
His soul was knit to this his native soil …(35)
                                                  … We have, thou know'st,
Another kinsman—he will be our friend
In this distress. He is a prosperous man,
Thriving in trade—and Luke to him shall go,
And with his kinsman's help and his own thrift
He quickly will repair this loss, and then
He may return to us. If here he stay,
What can be done?. …(36)

To be sure, in an age of agricultural depression and industrial expansion, this situation—of the beggared agriculturalist sending one or more of his family to be set up by an urban and mercantile relative—was being repeated in villages all over England (though incidentally Cumberland and Westmorland constituted rather a special case).³⁷ And of course Wordsworth was cognizant of this, and had something to say about it, more obviously in “Michael” than in “The Brothers”. But all the same, once we detect the identical situation in the two poems, the fact that Luke, Michael's son, turns out to be a bad lot, is hardly important. His bad behaviour, after leaving the dale, seems at first to be the pivot on which everything turns: but when we compare “Michael” with “The Brothers”, we see that the crux of the story is Luke's departure in the first place. In the same way, Michael's inability to complete his sheepfold is often taken to mean that he has no will to continue, once his son has failed him. Undoubtedly this implication is present and throws a beam of pathos on the famous line,

And never lifted up a single stone.(38)

But once again, the attainment of pathos is not the end of Wordsworth's intention; and this is not the last line of the poem.

Michael, as has been pointed out, belongs with the other great figures which loom, in Wordsworth's poems, immobile through the mist upon the fells. He belongs with the Leech-gatherer, and with that other who is

                    insensibly subdued
To settled quiet; he is one by whom
All effort seems forgotten; one to whom
Long patience hath such mild composure given,
That patience now doth seem a thing of which
He hath no need.(39)

Michael at the unfinished sheepfold is, in fact, another instance of animal tranquillity. Tranquillity may seem out of the question in respect of one so grievously wounded in the one relationship that was his life; and if we remember the close connexion between this tranquillity and “glee”, we may seem to make of Wordsworth a monster of inhumanity. But in the quite special senses of tranquillity and of glee which Wordsworth's other poems have established, the idea becomes more acceptable. For instance, he has insisted from the first that his tranquillity and his glee in no way exclude sorrow and regret. If he still seems inhuman, this is because any insight carried relentlessly through to its conclusion looks what it is, relentless. And Wordsworth is inhuman only as the fact and presence of genius is inhuman.

4

If Wordsworth's central interests in Lyrical Ballads are such as I have expounded, if the connexions he makes are indeed such as I have seen, the first response of the humane and intelligent reader must be to exclaim at his originality. And this is just. But in a period like ours when originality does not command such respect in and for itself as it did in the age succeeding Young's Conjectures on Original Composition, this perception can be made into a limitation; we are often asked to see Wordsworth, on whatever terms we present him, as a special case, and to dismiss him from our minds accordingly whenever we think of poetry in general and of poetry at the present time in particular. In these circumstances, at a time when (thanks to Eliot) we never use the concept of originality without at once passing nervously to the supposedly complementary notion of tradition, it is worth pointing out that Wordsworth's concerns, and his attitudes, were not unprecedented; that he had a tradition, and an ancient one, to which he could have appealed if he had chosen. It is characteristic of him that he didn't choose, and for the most part disdained to invoke the authority of Aristotle and Longinus. Nevertheless, such authority is available.

Wordsworth's emphasis on the poet's pleasure in perception as the central and distinguishing feature of poetry—a pleasure even in perception of what is painful, indeed especially in such perceptions⁴⁰—goes back to the classical and originally Aristotelian commonplace, admiratio, which was, in classical and again in scholastic and Renaissance times, particularly of moment in respect of the painful subjects of tragedy. Admiratio in these contexts is normally translated as “wonder”; and this does not help matters, since Watts-Dunton's definition of the Romantic movement as “The renascence of wonder” is now a very unfashionable idea. At the risk of rehabilitating a much-disliked Victorian, the point must be made; and we find the root of the tradition of poetic wonder in Aristotle's Metaphysics:

For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize. …

St Albert the Great, commenting on this passage, remarks, “Wonder is something like fear in its effect on the heart.” And this may serve to show the connexion between Aristotle on this point and Longinus, whose treatise on the elevated style, On the Sublime, is centrally concerned with the rhetorical concept of admiratio. For most readers will be aware of how eighteenth-century commentators on Longinus, such as Burke, spent a great deal of time with the apparently nonsensical proposition, which was however validated by experience as well as by Longinus' authority, that the pleasurable effect of sublime art was hardly distinguishable from the usually very unpleasurable emotion of fear. While Burke and others revived and explored this ancient connexion between wonder (admiratio) and fear, Wordsworth can be seen in Lyrical Ballads to be exploring its connection with joy. This too was a traditional connexion, though it was always secondary to the connexion with fear. J. V. Cunningham, for instance (to whom I am indebted for all these citations) defines admiratio as “the shocked limit of feeling”, and, summing up the implications for an understanding of Shakespeare of his use of the marvellous in his latest plays, decides:

Wonder, then, is associated not only with extreme fear but also with extreme joy, and is marked by silence and immobility.⁴¹

As has been seen, states of silence and immobility occur in nearly every one of the Lyrical Ballads, and these features are explained in the poems as the effects of joy.

It is with deliberation that I describe what these poems do by the homely word, “explaining”; for it is characteristic both of Wordsworth's practice in his poems and of his theory in his “Preface,” that he is quite unembarrassed by any wish to distinguish between knowing the human mind through poetry and knowing it in other ways, through the case-book of the field researcher or the rationally controlled introspection of the philosophical psychologist. It is therefore not only appropriate but necessary to point out, as J. V. Cunningham does for his purposes, that for Aristotle “wonder” is a concept which straddles the gap between logic and rhetoric, or, as we might say, between conceptual and aesthetic experience. This is the point of citing Aristotle's reference in the Metaphysics, and it is taken up in the Rhetoric:

Again, since learning and wondering are pleasant, it follows that such things as acts of imitation must be pleasant—for instance, painting, sculpture, poetry—and every product of skilful imitation: this latter, even if the object imitated is not in itself pleasant; for it is not the object itself which here gives delight; the spectator draws inferences (“That is a so-and-so”) and thus learns something fresh.

Cunningham comments on this passage very justly,⁴² “What we call aesthetic experience is for Aristotle substantially the experience of inferring.” This is true of Wordsworth also, and this is the pleasurable experience he gave to a reader such as De Quincey. Poetry for Wordsworth is a means of knowing the world, not a means of self-expression or self-adjustment.

Again, on the point that “it is natural for all to delight in works of imitation”, Aristotle writes in the Poetics:

The truth of this second point is shown by experience: though the objects themselves may be painful to see, we delight to view the most realistic representations of them in art, the forms for example of the lowest animals and of dead bodies. The explanation is to be found in a further fact: to be learning something is the greatest of pleasures not only to the philosopher but also the rest of mankind, however small their capacity for it; the reason of the delight in seeing the picture is that one is at the same time learning—gathering the meaning of things, e.g. that the man there is a so-and-so; …

St Thomas makes the same connexion. “Wonder,” he says, “is a kind of desire for knowledge”; and he goes on:

For this reason, everything wonderful is pleasurable: for example, anything that is infrequent, as well as any representation of things, even of those that are not in themselves pleasant. For the soul delights in comparing one thing with another, since this is a proper and connatural activity of reason, as Aristotle says in his Poetics.

If we can rid ourselves of the notion that Wordsworth's “Preface” is exclusively or even chiefly the expression of an extreme and unbalanced theory of poetic diction, and read it again looking for other things, it will appear that what chiefly interests Wordsworth about poetry is that which interested Aristotle, Longinus, Aquinas and Albertus Magnus, and that in speculating about it Wordsworth follows, whether he knows it or not, in paths trodden by those great predecessors. Moreover, all this element in the “Preface” is far more immediately and fruitfully relevant to the poems thus introduced, than is the theory of diction.

Wordsworth's theory of metre, for instance, is, as expounded in the “Preface,” generally and rightly thought to be inadequate—chiefly for the reason that Wordsworth lights upon an adequate rationale for metre only after he has already advanced several inadequate justifications, which he was then too careless or too idle to expunge. And so, when Elisabeth Schneider decides, “The conclusion is inescapable … that in theory at least, he did not get beyond the conception of metre as something ‘superadded’ to poetry, not an organic part of it,”⁴³ we can hardly blame her, for Wordsworth appears to have lit upon such a conception without realising it or else without caring for what he had come upon. Nevertheless, the passage exists to prove that at least the discovery was made, even if nothing was to be made of it; and the conception of metre there expressed is superior to either Hazlitt's or Coleridge's (those with which Miss Schneider compares it), superior because it sees metre as far more organic to poetry than on either Coleridge's or Hazlitt's showing. Metre in this conception is more organic to poetry because it is derived immediately from the principle which Wordsworth saw as central to all poetry whatever—the principle of delight, of the mind taking pleasure in the exercise of its own powers:

If I had undertaken a Systematic defence of the theory here maintained, it would have been my duty to develope the various causes upon which the pleasure received from metrical language depends. Among the chief of these causes is to be reckoned a principle which must be well known to those who have made any of the Arts the object of accurate reflection; namely, the pleasure which the mind derives from the perception of similitude in dissimilitude.

It is easy to see Aquinas (“For the soul delights in comparing one thing with another”) in this pleasurable “perception of similitude in dissimilitude,” which is, as Wordsworth goes on to say, “the great spring of the activity of our minds, and their chief feeder”. Moreover, this view of what metre does locks in with the rest of Wordsworth's thought as do none of his alternative cases for metre, which he develops earlier and at greater length. For just as St Thomas's perception of the pleasure of comparing is based on a perception of how knowing is pleasure and pleasure is in knowing, so Wordsworth's recognition that the pleasure in metre consists in the perception of similitude in dissimilitude is based upon the same realisation: knowing is pleasure, and pleasure is in knowing.

We have no sympathy but what is propagated by pleasure: I would not be misunderstood; but wherever we sympathise with pain, it will be found that the sympathy is produced and carried on by subtle combinations with pleasure. We have no knowledge, that is, no general principles drawn from the contemplation of particular facts, but what has been built up by pleasure, and exists in us by pleasure alone.

And if it is still required to be proved that this pleasure without which “we have no knowledge” is the pleasure which Aristotle perceived when he wrote how “learning and wondering are pleasant”, the proof is in the poems themselves, which concern themselves continually with those features of immobility and silence which are, as we have seen, traditionally connected with the rapt delight of the state of wonder.

5

It may still be unclear where the connexion is between the central concern of Wordsworth's poetry and the forms that poetry took. In particular, why were those forms, as Wordsworth's contemporaries noticed, so consistently undramatic? What is the connexion, if any, between this habit of Wordsworth's imagination and the central importance, for that imagination, of the fact of happiness, of joy? I can only venture a reply, and that reply in such general terms as perhaps to be useless. But Nietzsche has been cited already as one who was struck, as Wordsworth was, by the way in which health seeks out morbidity, by (to use Nietzsche's own terms) “A penchant of the mind for what is hard, terrible, evil, dubious in existence, arising from a plethora of health, plenitude of being.” And this “penchant of the mind” Nietzsche identifies with the Dionysiac temper or the Dionysiac principle. Now, in some exceptionally close and difficult passages of The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche explains how the Dionysiac dithyramb evolved into dramatic presentation, by the necessity for the Dionysiac to relate itself to (and in part assuage itself by) the sunny objective images of the Apollonian. Thus it becomes possible to conceive that in Wordsworth his contemporaries were struck by the Dionysiac spirit operating without any Apollonian admixture or complement; and if so, Wordsworth's Romanticism manifests itself very exactly as the rejection of the classical and neo-classical tradition, as the rejection of the supposedly necessary harmony between these two principles—a harmony continuously maintained or aimed at from ancient Greece through Rome to Augustan England. And is this, after all, to say any more than that Wordsworth witnesses to the conquering by the subjective of the objective world, of a reality bodied over against the perceiver? This after all is no new diagnosis of Romanticism. All that we gain, perhaps, from putting it in Nietzschean terms, is the realisation that in pre-history men had lived in those “abysses of idealism” into which Wordsworth plunges anew, with all the excitement and assurance of a man who treads where none have trod for centuries.

Notes

1. Crabb Robinson, Diary (20 Nov. 1820). Compare Robinson's description (5 Apr. 1823) of Wordsworth at a musical party: “(he) declared himself perfectly delighted and satisfied, but he sat alone, silent, and with his face covered, and was generally supposed to be asleep”.

2. Haydon's Autobiography, ed. M. Elwin. London, 1950, p. 245. Journal entry for 13 Apr. 1825.

3. Keats, Letters, ed. Forman (3rd edn.), p. 227, Oct. 1818, to Richard Woodhouse: “As to the poetical Character itself (I mean that sort of which, if I am any thing, I am a Member; that sort distinguished from the Wordsworthian or egotistical sublime; which is a thing per se and stands alone) it is not itself—it has no self—it is everything and nothing—It has no character—it enjoys light and shade; …”

4. Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age, ed. A. R. Waller. London, 1910 (Everyman Edition), p. 258.

5. The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson. London, 1945, 293-312.

6. The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years, ed. E. de Selincourt, 2 vols. Oxford, 1937, p. 198.

7. De Quincey's Literary Criticism, ed. H. Darbishire. London, 1909, pp. 227-8.

8. 13-16.

9. The poem was written at Alfoxden, and the names, though the names of real places, were chosen for euphony; the boy was Wordsworth's ward, son of his friend Basil Montagu.

10. “Anecdote for Fathers”, 49-56.

11. Op. cit., 57-60.

12. Nietzsche, A Critical Backward Glance (1886) to The Birth of Tragedy (1871). The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, tr. Francis Golffing. Garden City, N.Y., 1956, p. 4.

13. 1-4.

14. “The Idiot Boy”, 72-86.

15. “Expostulation and Reply”, 17-24.

16. “The Tables Turned”, 21-4.

17. “The Idiot Boy”, 450-1.

18. 9-12.

19. “Her Eyes are Wild”, 11-14.

20. “There was a Boy”, 11-16.

21. “Strange fits of passion have I known”, 21-8.

22. Coleridge, Letters, ed. E. H. Coleridge. London, 1895, p. 295 (6 May 1799).

23. “A slumber did my spirit seal”.

24. “Three years she grew”, 37-42.

25. “She dwelt among the untrodden ways”, 11-12.

26. 54-5.

27. 57-64.

28. 39-43.

29. 49-55.

30. “Three years she grew”, 13-18.

31. “I've heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds With coldness still returning; Alas! the gratitude of men Hath oftener left me mourning”.

32. “The Brothers”, 346.

33. Op. cit., 342-5.

34. Cf. Wordsworth's definition of “invention” (as one of five “powers requisite for the production of poetry”) in the Preface of 1815: “Invention,—by which characters are composed out of materials supplied by observation; whether of the Poet's own heart and mind, or of external life and nature; and such incidents produced as are most impressive to the imagination and most fitted to do justice to the characters, sentiments and passions, which the poet undertakes to illustrate”.

35. “The Brothers”, 292-8.

36. “Michael”, 247-54.

37. See Kenneth Maclean, Agrarian Age. A Background for Wordsworth. New Haven, 1950.

38. “Michael”, 466.

39. “Animal Tranquillity and Decay”, 7-12.

40. Henry Crabb Robinson, Diary (9 May 1815):

    “Wordsworth, in answer to the common reproach that his sensibility is excited by objects which produce no effect on others, admits the fact, and is proud of it. … The poet himself, as Hazlitt has well observed, has a pride in deriving no aid from his subject. It is the mere power which he is conscious of exerting in which he delights, not the production of a work in which men rejoice on account of the sympathies and sensibilities it excites in them”.

41. J. V. Cunningham, Woe or Wonder. Denver, Colo., 1951, p. 92.

42. Op. cit., p. 65.

43. Elisabeth Schneider, The Aesthetics of William Hazlitt. Philadelphia, 1933.