The discovery of humble life, of peasant character, of lowly, trivial scenes and incidents, as a field for poetry, was not original with Wordsworth. But he was the first English poet to explore this field thoroughly, sympathetically, with steady and deepening joy. Burns had been there before him; but the song of Burns though clear and passionate, was fitful. Cowper had been there before him; but Cowper was like a visitor from the polite world, never an inhabitant, never quite able to pierce gently, powerfully down to the realities of lowly life and abide in them. Crabbe had been there before him; but Crabbe was something of a pessimist; he felt the rough shell of the nut, but did not taste the sweet kernel.
Wordsworth, if I may draw a comparison from another art, was the Millet of English poetry. In his verse we find the same quality of perfect comprehension, of tender pathos, of absolute truth interfused with delicate beauty that makes Millet’s Angelus, and The Gleaners and The Sower and The Sheepfold, immortal visions of the lowly life. Place beside these pictures, if you will, Wordsworth’s Solitary Reaper, The Old Cumberland Beggar, Margaret waiting in her ruined cottage for the husband who would never return, Michael, the old shepherd who stood, many and many a day, beside the unfinished sheepfold which he had begun to build with his lost boy,
“And never lifted up a single stone,”—
place these beside Millet’s pictures, and the poems will bear the comparison.
Coleridge called Wordsworth “a miner of the human heart.” But there is a striking peculiarity in his mining: he searched the most familiar places, by the most simple methods, to bring out the rarest and least suspected treasures. His discovery was that there is an element of poetry, like some metal of great value, diffused through the common clay of every-day life.
It is true that he did not always succeed in separating the precious metal from the surrounding dross. There were certain limitations in his mind which prevented him from distinguishing that which was familiar and precious, from that which was merely familiar.
One of these limitations was his lack of a sense of humour. At a dinner-party he announced that he was never witty but once in his life. When asked to narrate the instance, after some hesitation he said: “Well, I will tell you. I was standing some time ago at the entrance of my cottage at Rydal Mount. A man accosted me with the question, ‘Pray, sir, have you seen my wife pass by?’ Whereupon I said, ‘Why, my good friend, I didn’t know till this moment that you had a wife!’” The humour of this story is unintentional and lies otherwhere than Wordsworth thought. The fact that he was capable of telling it as a merry jest accounts for the presence of many queer things in his poetry. For example; the lines in Simon Lee,
“Few months of life has he in store
As he to you will tell,