Here is the theory full-blown. The poet is not to tell the tale, the reader is to make it one, by thinking; and if he only thinks enough, he will find a tale in everything! Could anything be more grotesque, or more utterly opposed to any sane canon of the function of an author, and his relation to his readers? It is the business of the poet to tell the tale, and thereby to set the reader thinking; an altogether different process from the one here suggested. “Wordsworthians against whom we must be upon our guard,” often cite the following stanza with admiration:
The moving accident is not my trade;
To freeze the blood I have no ready arts:
’Tis my delight, alone in summer shade,
To pipe a simple song for thinking hearts!
Have they forgotten the “moving accidents by flood and field,” or do they not know whose trade it was to unfold a tale that
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood?
Piping a simple song for thinking hearts, is all very well. But it will not do to say, or to suggest, or to allow it to be inferred, that doing this makes a man as great a poet as doing what Wordsworth did not and plainly could not do. In the last book of The Excursion, he says:
Life, death, eternity! momentous themes
Are they—and might demand a seraph’s tongue,
Were they not equal to their own support;
And therefore no incompetence of mine
Could do them wrong....
Ye wished for art and circumstance, that make
The individual known and understood;
And such as my best judgment could select
From what the place afforded, could be given.
But no subject is equal to its own support, where the poet is concerned, however it may be with the preacher and the moralist. The poet himself must support it. We do wish for act and circumstance, in poetry; and when Wordsworth tells us that he has, in The Excursion, given us the best of these he can, we can only answer that this best is not enough, but wholly insufficient and inadequate.
That Mr. Arnold would deny all this, if put to him plainly, we do not believe. It is all the more to be regretted that he should have expressed himself in such a manner as to encourage others in forming judgments and holding opinions which imply affirmation to the contrary. When he quotes from Wordsworth the following lines,
Of truth, of grandeur, beauty, love, and hope,
And melancholy fear subdued by faith,
Of blessëd consolation, in distress,
Of moral strength and intellectual power,
Of joy in widest commonalty spread,
and adds that “here we have a poet intent on the best and master thing,” and wishes us to infer Wordsworth’s superiority from that fact, does he not perceive that he is not only misleading his readers, but flagrantly contradicting what he himself avers in the selfsame essay? Being “intent” on these subjects is not enough. A further question remains to be answered; viz. how has the poet dealt with them? Nowhere has Wordsworth dealt with them so completely, so ambitiously, so exhaustively, as in The Excursion. Yet what does Mr. Arnold say of it? He says that The Excursion can never be a satisfactory work to the disinterested lover of poetry, and that much of it is “a tissue of elevated but abstract verbiage, alien to the very nature of poetry.” It is plain, therefore, that being “intent” even on “the best and master thing” does not suffice. The passage Mr. Arnold quotes, leaving the incautious reader to infer that it does suffice, is merely the