We have presented this bare biographical outline as preliminary to all remark and criticism. But this meagre chronological table is not to be dismissed without some attention. The array of mere names and figures, dry as they may look, are really full of curious significance, and pregnant with many thoughts and conjectures.
Let us consider, for example, upon what sort of reading the youthful period of Wordworth’s life was cast. The English literature of the then closing eighteenth century, as deficient, perhaps, in force and fertility as it is remarkable for justness and propriety and elegance of diction, was attaining its completion in Cowper, who, born in 1731, and dying in 1800, published his one great poem, ‘The Task,’ in 1785.
As we now read Scott’s novels and poems, Byron, and Southey, and Wordsworth, so they in Wordsworth’s boyhood read the series from Pope to Johnson, read Fielding, and Richardson, and Sterne, and Gray, and Collins, and Goldsmith.
What effect upon the minds of young men of this time had Burns—or, to turn to foreign literature, the works of Rousseau?
To proceed lower down. The curious meeting of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey deserves special notice. In proximity to Wordsworth, Coleridge blazed forth in a stream of poetic brilliancy, which his after years never, in any sort or kind, repeated; in no after moments did he ever create an ‘Ancient Mariner’ or a ‘Christabel.’ Wordsworth, also, was elevated and enkindled by the more vivid and radiating genius of Coleridge. Notice again how completely anterior and antecedent to Scott, and Moore, and Byron, are those Lake Poets, whose nascent influence and popularity they so completely overpowered. But without ‘Christabel’ the ‘Lay of the Last Minstrel’ would never have been written. Without Scott’s stories we should scarcely have had Byron’s; without Wordsworth’s, and the reminiscences of Hawkshead village-school, we should never have had the third and fourth cantos of ‘Childe Harold’; we should have lost, very probably, half the beauty of Byron alike and Scott.
Like the runners in the torch race, they hand along the flame. Who shall say, in these spiritual and subtle exchanges and interchanges, This is mine, and that is thine? We cannot indeed, I think, assert that Wordsworth derived anything directly from Byron, or even from Scott (the ‘White Doe of Rylstone,’ so far as it follows Scott at all, so far is a failure); but without that antagonism, and without the severe lessons their popularity taught him, he probably would not either have escaped his natural faults, nor exerted his natural strength.
Out of Wordsworth and Byron came forth Shelley; nor is Keats (there is no such thing) an independent genius. We may remark also how, as the brief career of Byron encloses within itself the yet briefer life of Shelley, and Keats’s briefest of all, so is Byron himself included in the larger arc of Scott, and the yet larger arc of Wordsworth. Wordsworth, gradually working his way to reputation, was displaced by the sudden glory of Scott. Scott, as a poet, presently has to resign the field to Byron, and to compete against his Corsairs and Beppos with the new phenomenon of the ‘Waverley’ novels. When Byron had died in early manhood, and Scott in premature age; when the furor for the poet had passed away, and the charm of the novelist had begun to decline, Wordsworth first tasted the sweets of popular acceptance, and received in his turn, at the end of his laborious and honourable life, the reward which his rivals had almost outlived.
It is a curious and yet an undeniable fact that Wordsworth, who began his poetical course with what was, at any rate, understood by most readers to be a disclaimer and entire repudiation of the ornament of style and poetic diction, really derives from his style and his diction his chief and special charm. I shall not venture categorically to assert that his practice is in positive opposition to the doctrine he maintains in the prefaces, and supplementary remarks, which accompanied his Lyrical Ballads, and which, calling down upon him and them the hostility of reviews and the ridicule of satirists, made him notorious as one
Who both by precept and example shows
That prose is verse, and verse is merely prose.