In no instance, however, save perhaps that of the Pléiade and Du Bellay’s Défense et Illustration, did a protagonist of the new poetry take the field in prose so early and so aggressively as did Wordsworth in his Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads. In none, without exception, was such an attack so searchingly criticised and so powerfully seconded, with corrections of its mistakes, as in the case of the well-known chapters of the Biographia Literaria in which Coleridge examined Wordsworth’s examination. These, it is true, came later in time, but when the campaign, whereof the first sword had been drawn in the Lyrical Ballads, and the first horn blown in the Preface of their second edition, though far gone was not finished, when the final blows, by the hands of Keats and Shelley, had still to be struck.

The former’s Prefaces.

The Preface, with the little group of other prefaces and observations which supplements it,[[349]] provides a bundle of documents unequalled in interest except by the De Vulgari Eloquio in the special class, while, as it happens, it goes directly against the tenor of that precious booklet. Wordsworth, there can be no doubt, had been deeply annoyed by the neglect or the contemptuous reception of the Lyrical Ballads, to which hardly any one had done justice except the future Archdeacon Wrangham, while his own poems in simple language had offended even more than The Ancient Mariner had puzzled. To some extent I do not question that—his part of the scheme being to make the familiar poetical, just as it was Coleridge’s to make the unfamiliar acceptable, the uncommon common—the refusal of “poetic diction” which he here advances and defends was a vera causa, a true actuating motive. But there is also, I think, no doubt that, as so often happens, resentment, and a dogged determination to “spite the fools,” made him here represent the principle as much more deliberately carried out than it actually was. And the same doggedness was no doubt at the root of his repetition of this principle in all his subsequent prose observations, though, as has been clear from the first to almost all impartial observers,[[350]] he never, from Tintern Abbey onwards, achieves his highest poetry, and very rarely achieves high poetry at all, without putting that principle in his pocket.

That to Lyrical Ballads, 1800.

That the actual preface begins with a declaration that he was rather more than satisfied with the reception of his poems, and that the appearance of a systematic defence is set down to “request of friends,” is of course not in the least surprising, and will only confirm any student of human nature in the certainty that pique was really at the bottom of the matter. As a matter of fact, there is no more typical example of an aggressive-defensive plaidoyer in the whole history of literature.

Its history.

It begins with sufficient boldness and originality (indeed “W. W.” was never deficient in either) with admission that “by writing in verse, an author is supposed to make a formal engagement that he will gratify certain habits of association,” and merely urging that these habits have varied remarkably. The principle here is sound enough; it is in effect the same which we have traced in previous “romantic” criticism from Shenstone onwards; but the historical illustrations are unfortunate. They are “the age of Catullus, Terence, and Lucretius” contrasted with that of Statius and Claudian, and “the age of Shakespeare and Beaumont and Fletcher” with that of Donne and Cowley or Dryden and Pope. The nisus of the school towards the historic argument, and, at the same time, its imperfect education in literary history, could hardly be better illustrated. For, not to quibble about the linking of Statius and Claudian, the age of Catullus and Lucretius was most certainly not the age of Terence; and the English pairs are still more luckless. Donne and Cowley, Shakespeare and Beaumont and Fletcher, are bad enough in themselves: but the postponement of Donne to the twin dramatists, when he was the elder of Fletcher probably by six or seven years, of Beaumont by ten or twelve, is rather sad. However, it is not on history that Wordsworth bases his attack.