CHAPTER XXVII

WAR WITH REVIEWERS

PROBABLY the first review or extended notice of " The Excursion" was that begun in The Examiner for August 21, 1814, and continued on August 28 and October 2. The writer was William Hazlitt. His judgment of the poem as a whole and of Wordsworth's genius was highly favourable; regarding particulars, and very essential ones, it was severe, though shallow. As a professional essayist of the kind then beginning to go out of fashion, Hazlitt embraces the opportunity to write a clever satire on country life, which he affects to find selfish and barbarous. To his mind the stories contained in the poem detract from its merit, and that not merely because they break its harmony as a philosophical work, but because, with two exceptions, that of the Whig and Jacobite gentlemen and that of Sir Alfred Irthing, their subjects are "low." This from Hazlitt, the unreconciled Revolutionist, is rather unexpected.

"We can go along with him," he declares," while he is the subject of his own narrative, but we take leave of him when he makes pedlars and ploughmen his heroes and the interpreters of his sentiment. It is, we think, getting into low company, and company, besides, that we do not like. We take Mr. Wordsworth himself for a great poet, a fine moralist, and a deep philosopher; but if he insists on introducing us to a friend of his, a parish clerk, or the barber of the village, who is as wise as himself, we must be excused if we draw back with some little want of cordial faith." Again he says: "The extreme simplicity which some persons have objected to Mr. Wordsworth's poetry is to be found only in the

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subject and the style: the sentiments are subtle and profound. In the latter respect, his poetry is as much above the common standard or capacity, as in the other it is below it. His poems bear a distinct resemblance to some of Rembrandt's landscapes, who more than any other painter created the medium through which he saw Nature, and out of the stump of an old tree, a break in the sky, and a bit of water, could produce an effect almost miraculous."

However much there may have been in this passage to discourage the poet, since it was evident that even so acute and receptive a mind as Hazlitt's had failed to apprehend the principles of the new poetry, nevertheless it was some comfort that so early as August 21 a popular magazine could print the following sentence, with which the essay began:

"In power of intellect, in lofty conception, in the depth of feeling, at once simple and sublime, which pervades every part of it, and which gives to every object an almost preternatural and preterhuman interest, this work has seldom been surpassed."

As to the subjects chosen by the poet, Hazlitt was too sophisticated and too coarse-grained to sympathize with him. He says:

"In describing human nature, Mr. Wordsworth equally shuns the common vantage-grounds of popular story, of striking incident, or fatal catastrophe, as illegitimate or vulgar modes of producing an effect... He contemplates the passions and habits of men, not in their extremes, but in their first elements. He only sympathizes with those forms of feeling which mingle at once with his own identity or the stream of general humanity. To him the great and the small are the same; the near and the remote; what appears, and what only is. The common and the permanent, like the Platonic ideas, are his only realities."

The same failure to understand the fundamental principles of Wordsworth's art is shown in the following passage:

"We could have wished Mr. Wordsworth had given to his work the form of a philosophical poem altogether,

with only occasional digressions or allusions to particular instances. There is in his general sentiments and reflections on human life a depth, an originality, a truth, a beauty, and grandeur, both of conception and expression, which place him decidedly at the head of the poets of the present day, or rather which place him in a totally distinct class of excellence.

But he has chosen

to encumber himself with a load of narrative and descriptions which, instead of assisting, hinders the progress and effect of the general reasoning."

"

The reviewer quite properly objects to the adjective "dull" as applied to a work of Voltaire. There is one really noble passage in the article-Hazlitt's rebuke to Wordsworth for his cold renunciation of Revolutionary hopes. After a glowing description of those hopes, he concludes:

"The dawn of that day was suddenly overcast; that season of hope is past; it is fled with the other dreams of our youth, which we cannot recall; but has left behind it traces which are not to be effaced by birthday odes, or the chanting of Te Deums in all the churches of Christendom. To those hopes eternal regrets are due; to those who maliciously and wilfully blasted them in the fear that they might be accomplished, we feel no less what we owe-hatred and scorn as lasting."

Jeffrey's famous article on "The Excursion" in The Edinburgh Review for November, 1814, is by no means a criticism to be lightly set aside. He had the instinct of a good football player, who always knows who is running with the ball. He understood what Wordsworth was aiming at, and, since he wished poetry to take a different course, he tried to block him. And, as compared with the encounters seven years before, his tackling was fairer and harder. His abundant good taste and his natural zest for originality of thought and phase compelled him to grant that Wordsworth possessed great powers. There were in the poem, he admitted, many passages of tenderness, and others in a lofty and impassioned style.

"When we look back to them, indeed," he says near the end of his review," and to the other passages which

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we have now extracted, we feel half inclined to rescind the severe sentence which we passed on the work at the beginning. But when we look into the work itself, we perceive that it cannot be rescinded. Nobody can be more disposed to do justice to the great powers of Mr Wordsworth than we are; and, from the first time that he came before us, down to the present moment, we have uniformly testified in their favour, and assigned, indeed, our high sense of their value as the chief ground of the bitterness with which we resented their perversion. That perversion, however, is now far more visible than their original dignity; and while we collect the fragments, it is impossible not to lament the ruins from which we are condemned to pick them."

His "bitterness" was really due to three causes. In the first place, his hard practical sense was offended at the poet's reckless throwing away of his chances. It would have been so easy, he thought, to avoid useless and irritating blunders, such as Wordsworth's announcement, in the Preface, that this poem of 420 pages in sumptuous quarto was only a Portion of a Poem, belonging to the second part of a long and laborious Work, which was to consist of three parts. Such an announcement was an affront to weak humanity, a defiance of time itself. On this subject Jeffrey simply had the frankness to say what everybody must think.

His taste, also, somewhat narrowed, it is true, by the pressure of an extremely busy endeavour to determine from month to month what was most worth while in current literature, revolted against Wordsworth's prolixity.

And, again, he objected on principle, and in accordance with the whole system of his thinking, to what may be crudely termed Wordsworth's democracy. The "lowness" of Wordsworth's characters seemed to him incongruous with the sentiments they express and the language they use. "Why," he demanded, "should Mr. Wordsworth have made his hero a superannuated Pedlar? What but the most wretched and provoking perversity of taste and judgment could induce anyone to place his chosen advocate of wisdom and virtue in

so absurd and fantastic a condition? Did Mr. Wordsworth really imagine that his favourite doctrines were likely to gain anything in point of effect or authority by being put into the mouth of a person accustomed to higgle about tape or brass sleeve-buttons ?" He recurs more than once, with partisan bitterness, to the charge that Wordsworth indulged "an affected passion for simplicity and humble life."

There is also a fourth clause in the indictment, not to be taken too seriously, as it was no doubt drawn with an elegant pretence of ignorance. It is that the poem is too "mystical," whateyer that may mean, and that the speculative passages in which this error floats are incomprehensible. With very slight trouble Jeffrey might have seen that the purpose of these passages was to accomplish that reconciliation between natural religion and orthodox theology which he, of all men, would have been among the first to applaud. If the editor of The Edinburgh Review really did not, as he asserted, form the slightest guess as to the meaning of the following passage (Book IV., lines 68-76), this shows how slow Englishmen and even Scotsmenwere to acquaint themselves with the terms and conceptions of Kant:

Possessions vanish, and opinions change,
And passions hold a fluctuating seat:

But, by the storms of circumstance unshaken,
And subject neither to eclipse nor wane,

Duty exists;-immutably survive,

For our support, the measures and the forms,

Which an abstract intelligence supplies;

Whose kingdom is, where time and space are not.

And another allegation besides would seem to have been made carelessly, and to have been scarcely meant, namely, that the whole substance of Wordsworth's work was infected with "a puerile ambition of singularity." A certain undertone of respect which makes itself heard perforce now and then, even in this article, prevents one from believing that Jeffrey thought Wordsworth a pretender.