Gents Mag 1851 part 2 p.110
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Gentleman's Magazine 1851 part 2 p.110
list, Southey he accuses justly enough of a want of sympathy with the dealings and the passions of men; yet, considering the qtr from which it comes, the accusation is somewhat strange. Scott he describes as unveracious in his representations of nature, and terms him a poet only to the ear. Byron he could scarcely be expected to like, - for Wordsworth's canons of composition had been fashioned in a very different school, and were fixed ere Childe Harold, like a strong fever-fit, seized upon the general mind. Of Keats we find nothing recorded; but we can imagine that the liberties he took in "Endymion" with idiom, metre, and even words, would offend so zealous a purist in style, as Mr. Wordsworth was, quite as much as, by his own confession, Mr. Carlyle's prose aggrieved him. We were agreeably surprised to find that Wordsworth thought Shelley "one of the bests artists of us all; I mean in workmanship of style;" and were equally amazed when we read his depreciation of Goethe. But, on this point, the late Laureate was so pertinaciously heretical, that we must leave the reader to wonder at his verdict, since we should speedily exhaust our remaining columns by any attempt to move for a new trial. To reviewers, and especially those who clothe their thoughts in blue and yellow, Mr. Wordsworth bore no good will. He certainly had received some shrewd thrusts from the craft, and the late Lord Jeffrey did not hold his sword like a dancer. Nevertheless we cannot but think the poet "paulo iniquior" when he speaks of the Edinburgh Aristarchus as having taken "a perpetual retainer from his own incapacity to plead against my claims to public approbation." In 1816 this little bravura was confined to the poet's "Own Correspondent;" but by printing it in 1851 the editor has very unnecessarily exposed it to public gaze. We presume that the "incapacity" spoken of is confined to a supposed insensibilty in the critic to poetic sensations. In any other sense the imputation is incredible even from a victim under the scourge. But in his protest against critical asperities Wordsworth overlooked more than one cause of the "retainer." He did not sufficiently take into account that if he were not exactly a hardy experimentalist he was at least commencing a very sweeping reform in poetry. Since the lasts chords of Milton's harp had sounded, poetry had been too much the creature of books and artificial life. Among Wordsworth's own contemporaries it had assumed new vigour and alacrity, but it was a dramatic energy with which for the most part he had little sympathy. In the applause which he bestows upon his successor in the laureateship, he discloses unconsciously the secret of his own early unpopularity. "Tennyson," he writes in 1845, "is decidedly the first of our living poets. You will be pleased to hear that he expressed in the strongest terms his gratitude to my writings. To this I was far from indifferent, though persuaded that he is not much in sympathy with what I should myself most value in my attempts, viz. the spirituality with which I have endeavoured to invest the material universe, and the moral relations under which I have wished to exhibit its most ordinary appearances." Now at once to "call upon the age to quit its clogs," to withold its admiration from Scott and Campbell and Byron - for such, virtually, was Wordsworth's demand - was a kind of poetical "stand and deliver," for which the said public was by no means prepared. And when this summons was followed by a request to see with Wordsworth's eyes and to hear with his ears, if people aspired to any skill in the moral intimations of nature, it is not surprising that both critics and readers turned refractory and demanded their preremptory monitor's credentials. Dr. Wordsworth makes heavy complaints of the wrongs inflicted upon his uncle by men who had never studied his art with any earnestness, and who therefore had no rights to dictate to him. And on the heel of his complaints he preaches a sermon to future critics, warning them, on the one hand, against rash judgments, and the "pensive public," on the other, against following such false shepherds. This may be good counsel: but it is of the kind which will never be acted upon. For to the end of poetic time the genuine poet will not be welcomed with instantaneous acclaim, but must discipline his |
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