The only way in which the best poetry corresponds with "the very language of men," is in its expressions resembling those which some few of the most highly cultivated would use on the rarest occasions. In daily converse language wanders unrestrainedly; in public speech it is restrained by imperative connection and continuity of thought; in the prose work, the carefully elaborated sentence progresses naturally through all its twists and turnings; in verse, the form cannot be too exquisite or too compact. Here the doctrine applies which Théophile Gautier preached in his splendid poem, L'Art:—
"Oui, l'œuvre sort plus belle
D'une forme au travail
Rebelle,
Vers, marbre, onyx, émail!
Point de contraintes fausses!
Mais que pour marcher droit
Tu chausses,
Muse, un cothurne étroit!"
But, however much there is to be said against Wordsworth's poetics, or "prosaics," as they might more correctly be called—against theories which were at first accepted as synonymous with the "Fair is foul, and foul is fair" of the witches in Macbeth—they are in the highest degree interesting to the student of literature to-day as an accurate and unambiguous expression of the first literary extreme to which English Naturalism went.
[1] R. S. Mackenzie: Life of Dickens, p. 243.
[2] Masson: Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and other Essays.
[3] Johannes Ewald, a Danish poet.—Transcriber's note.
[4] Oh! many are the poets that are sown
By nature! men endowed with highest gifts,
The vision and the faculty divine,
Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse.
—Excursion: Book I.