Aspects of Literature

by John Middleton Murry

Coleridge enumerates Wordsworth's defects one by one. The first, he says, is an inconstancy of style. For a moment he appears to invoke his principles: 'Wordsworth sinks too often and too abruptly to that style which I should place in the second division of language, dividing it into the three species; first, that which is peculiar to poetry; second, that which is proper only in prose; and third, the neutral or common to both.' But in the very first instance which Coleridge gives we can see that the principles have been dragged in by the hair, and that they are really alien to the argument which he is pursuing. He gives this example of disharmony from the poem on 'The Blind Highland Boy' (whose washing-tub in the 1807 edition, it is perhaps worth noting, had been changed at Coleridge's own suggestion, with a rash contempt of probabilities, into a turtle shell in the edition of 1815):—

'And one, the rarest, was a shell
Which he, poor child, had studied well:
The Shell of a green Turtle, thin
And hollow;—you might sit therein,
It was so wide, and deep.

'Our Highland Boy oft visited
The house which held this prize; and led
By choice or chance, did thither come
One day, when no one was at home,
And found the door unbarred.'

The discord is, in any case, none too apparent; but if one exists, it does not in the least arise from the actual language which Wordsworth has used. If in anything, it consists in a slight shifting of the focus of apprehension, a sudden and scarcely perceptible emphasis on the detail of actual fact, which is a deviation from the emotional key of the poem as a whole. In the next instance the lapse is, however, indubitable:—

'Thou hast a nest, for thy love and thy rest.
And though little troubled with sloth,
Drunken Lark! thou would'st be loth
To be such a traveller as I.
Happy, happy liver!
With a soul as strong as a mountain River
Pouring out praise to th' Almighty Giver,
Joy and jollity be with us both,
Hearing thee or else some other
As merry as a Brother
I on the earth will go plodding on,
By myself, cheerfully, till the day is done.'

The two lines in italics are discordant. But again it is no question of language in itself; it is an internal discrepancy between the parts of a whole already debilitated by metrical insecurity.

Coleridge's second point against Wordsworth is 'a matter-of-factness in certain poems.' Once more there is no question of language. Coleridge takes the issue on to the highest and most secure ground. Wordsworth's obsession with realistic detail is a contravention of the essential catholicity of poetry; and this accidentality is manifested in laboriously exact description both of places and persons. The poet sterilises the creative activity of poetry, in the first case, for no reason at all, and in the second, because he proposes as his immediate object a moral end instead of the giving of æsthetic pleasure. His prophets and wise men are pedlars and tramps not because it is probable that they should be of this condition—it is on the contrary highly improbable—but because we are thus to be taught a salutary moral lesson. The question of language in itself, if it enters at all here, enters only as the indifferent means by which a non-poetic end is sought. The accidentality lies not in the words, but in the poet's intention.

Coleridge's third and fourth points, 'an undue predilection for the dramatic form,' and 'an eddying instead of a progression of thought,' may be passed as quickly as he passes them himself, for in any case they could only be the cause of a jejuneness of language. The fifth, more interesting, is the appearance of 'thoughts and images too great for the subject … an approximation to what might be called mental bombast.' Coleridge brings forward as his first instance of this four lines which have taken a deep hold on the affections of later generations:—

'They flash upon the inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude!
And then my heart with pleasure fills
And dances with the daffodils.'

Coleridge found an almost burlesque bathos in the second couplet after the first. It would be difficult for a modern critic to accept that verdict altogether; nevertheless his objection to the first couplet as a description of physical vision is surely sound. And it is interesting to note that the objection has been evaded by posterity in a manner which confirms Coleridge's criticism. The 'inward eye' is almost universally remembered apart from its context, and interpreted as a description of the purely spiritual process to which alone, in Coleridge's opinion, it was truly apt.