"Written at the Request of Sir George Beaumont, Bart., and in his Name, for an Urn, placed by him at the termination of a newly-planted Avenue in the same Grounds."
Titles like these are not only fatiguing in the very reading, a preliminary disenchantment, but they are not properly names at all; they are headings, rubrics, captions which do not name. Wordsworth seems to send forth these unlucky children of the muse with a full description of their eyes, hair, and complexion, but forgets to christen them; and I believe that this oversight, though it may not appear a very serious one, has interfered more than a little with the effectiveness of his minor poetry, and consequently with the fame and influence of the poet. For it makes reference to them difficult, almost impossible: how is one to refer to a favorite passage, for instance, in a poem "Written at the Request of Sir George Beaumont, Bart., and in his Name, for an Urn, placed by him at the termination of a newly-planted Avenue in the same Grounds"? These titles are fit to discourage even the admirers of Wordsworth, and to repel his intending students; nor will they attract any one, for they are formless; they are the abstracts of essays, the précis of an argument, rather than fit designations for works of poetic art. A considerable number, too, of Wordsworth's minor pieces remain without name, title, or description of any kind whatever. If that desirable thing, a satisfactory edition of his poems, should ever appear, it will be given us by some editor who shall be sensitive to this northern formlessness, and who may venture, perhaps, to improve the state of Wordsworth's titles.
Let me end this digression by noting another singular title, with its emendation. In the "Lyrical Ballads" of 1798 appeared a poem with this extraordinary caption:
"Anecdote for Fathers, shewing how the art of Lying may be taught."
Now, certainly, Wordsworth did not intend to teach the art of lying, yet nothing can be clearer than his declaration. He failed to see the ludicrous meaning of these words, and it took him thirty years, apparently, to find out what he had said; but he saw it at last, and dropped the explanatory clause of the title, quoting in its place an apt motto from Eusebius; and we now read:
"Anecdote for Fathers. Retine vim istam, falsa enim dicam, si coges;" and the charming story professes no longer to show how boys may be taught to lie, but to point out the danger of making them lie when you press them to give reasons for their sentiments.
And now, returning to the corrections of text in the descriptive passages, let us note a curious change in the poem already mentioned, "On the Influence of Natural Objects," etc. Wordsworth is describing the pleasures of skating; and these are some of them, according to the passage as originally published in "The Friend":
Not seldom from the uproar I retired Into a silent bay—or sportively Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng To cut across the image of a Star That gleamed upon the ice.
To do this is of course impossible, and the lines which I have italicized are mere closet description. We cannot skate across the reflection of a star until we can skate into the end of a rainbow; and the curious thing is that the so-called "poet of nature" should ever have fancied, even for a moment at his desk, that he had ever done it. Clearly, Wordsworth's study was not always out of doors, to use a favorite phrase of his; on the contrary, this passage is so unreal that a critic unacquainted with the personal history of the poet might argue that he had never been on skates—as Coleridge wrote the "Hymn in the Valley of Chamouni" without ever visiting that valley. But Wordsworth seems to have found out that his description was false; for he made a compromise, in the later editions, with the optical law of incidence and reflection; and we now see him attempting merely, but not achieving, the impossible thing:
——Leaving the tumultuous throng To cut across the reflex of a star That fled, and, flying still before me, gleamed Upon the glassy plain.