In the first volume of his "Imaginary Conversations" Landor said of Wordsworth: "Those who attack him with virulence or with levity are men of no morality and no reflection." In a later volume, however, Landor attacks him thus himself, with both virulence and levity, as I fear we must say, and Wordsworth declined to profit by these later gibing criticisms, though some of them, and especially those upon the "Anecdote for Fathers," were valuable, and suggested real improvements of text. In this attack, which is contained in the second conversation of Southey and Porson, Landor had noticed Wordsworth's adoption of his earlier criticism of Laodamia; and this circumstance was probably a reason why Wordsworth refused to receive further critical favors at his hands. The poem "Goody Blake and Harry Gill," for instance, sharply criticised by Landor, stood almost untouched through the editions of fifty years. And in a letter of 1843, recently published for the first time,[E] Wordsworth speaks thus severely of an attack made upon his son-in-law, Edward Quillinan, by Landor: "I should have disapproved of his [Quillinan's] condescending to notice anything that a man so deplorably tormented by ungovernable passion as that unhappy creature might eject. His character may be given in two or three words: a madman, a bad man; yet a man of genius, as many a madman is." That criticism seems rather more than righteously severe; but Wordsworth, while he cared little for the criticism of the reviews, felt keenly the lash of the violent Landor. The violent Landor we must call him, for violence was the too dominant trait of his noble genius; and he exasperated Wordsworth, as we see. But compare what I have just quoted with his familiar remark about the small critics: "My ears are stone dead to this idle buzz, and my flesh as insensible as iron to these petty stings." That Wordsworth said at thirty-six years of age; and here is a striking reminiscence recorded during his later years, and published in the "Prose Works." At seventy-one he said to Lady Richardson:
It would certainly have been a great object to me to have reaped the profits I should have done from my writings but for the stupidity of Mr. Gifford and the impertinence of Mr. Jeffrey. It would have enabled me to purchase many books which I could not obtain, and I should have gone to Italy earlier, which I never could afford to do until I was sixty-five, when Moxon gave me a thousand pounds for my writings. This was the only kind of injury Mr. Jeffrey did me, for I immediately perceived that his mind was of that kind that his individual opinion on poetry was of no consequence to me whatever; that it was only by the influence his periodical exercised at the time in preventing my poems being read and sold that he could injure me.... I never, therefore, felt his opinion of the slightest value except in preventing the young of that generation from receiving impressions which might have been of use to them through life.
This is grand self-confidence; and it is in the same tone that elsewhere he says:
Feeling that my writings were founded on what was true and spiritual in human nature, I knew the time would come when they must be known.
In this connexion the English reviews of that time are still interesting reading, particularly the "Quarterly" and the "Edinburgh." What was Jeffrey saying in his "organ" during the years of Wordsworth's earlier fame? In 1807 he described the poem of "The Beggars" as "a very paragon of silliness and affectation"; and he said of "Alice Fell," "If the printing of such verses be not felt as an insult on the public taste, we are afraid it cannot be insulted." Two years later he calls upon the patrons of the Lake school of poetry to "think with what infinite contempt the powerful mind of Burns would have perused the story of Alice Fell and her duffle cloak, of Andrew Jones and the half-crown, or of little Dan without breeches and his thievish grandfather." Wordsworth dropped the poem of "Andrew Jones," and never restored it—an omission almost unique, as we shall see; for he stood by the substance of his work, if not always by the form, with great pertinacity. He said of "Alice Fell," in his old age, "It brought upon me a world of ridicule by the small critics, so that in policy I excluded it from many editions of my poems, till it was restored at the request of some of my friends." Wordsworth had no stancher friend, his poetry had no more delicate critic, than Charles Lamb; and Lamb wrote thus in 1815 to Wordsworth about "Alice Fell" and the assailants of the poem. He said: "I am glad that you have not sacrificed a verse to those scoundrels. I would not have had you offer up the poorest rag that lingered upon the stript shoulders of little Alice Fell, to have atoned all their malice: I would not have given 'em a red cloak to save their souls."
Jeffrey decried two other pieces that rank among the most perfect of Wordsworth's minor poems, as "stuff about dancing daffodils and sister Emmelines," and spoke of another, which we count for pure poetry to-day, as "a rapturous, mystical ode to the cuckoo, in which the author, striving after force and originality, produces nothing but absurdity." And he attacked these lines in the "Ode to Duty":
Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong: And the most ancient heavens through thee are fresh and strong.
This, Jeffrey said, is "utterly without meaning: at least we have no sort of conception in what sense Duty can be said to keep the old skies fresh, and the stars from wrong." We need not be surprised at Jeffrey's failing to admire these lines: they are transcendentalism, and it would have troubled Wordsworth himself to render them into the plain speech which he recommended as the proper diction of poetry. For they have not a definite translatable content of thought; and we cannot read them as philosophy or ethics; but as poetry we may feel their power; we are willing to enjoy them for their own sake, because beauty is enough. But this Jeffrey did not admit; Jeffrey was not vulnerable by magnificent phrases, and of course he could not foresee what a power Wordsworth's transcendentalism was to exert. When the ode "Intimations of Immortality" first appeared (with the edition of 1807), Jeffrey called it "the most illegible and unintelligible part of the publication."[F] The remark need not surprise us. Jeffrey looked for logical thought in the poem, and logical thought it had not; whatever else it may contain, it will hardly be said to propound any new arguments for immortality. But Jeffrey wrote in all sincerity, and later in his life he read Wordsworth's poetry a second time, with a view to discover, if he could, the merits which he had failed to see when he criticised it—the merits which the English public had then found out. His effort was a failure: for him the primrose remained a primrose to the last, and nothing more. The acute lawyer was not a poet, nor a judge of poets; he had an erroneous notion of what the office of poetry is; of what it has been and will be—to please, to elevate, to suggest, but not to argue or convince; and to the last he did not get beyond his early decision, which, in the article just quoted from, runs as follows:
We think there is every reason to hope that the lamentable consequences which have resulted from Mr. Wordsworth's open violation of the established laws of poetry, will operate as a wholesome warning to those who might otherwise have been seduced by his example, and be the means of restoring to that ancient and venerable code its honor and authority.
But the critic cannot always tell what the new "song is destined to, and what the stars intend to do." It is now evident enough where the early assailants of Wordsworth were mistaken; and yet which critic of to-day would be sure of his ground in a similar case? For the faults of genius are old, familiar, and easily to be discerned; while, on the other hand, genius itself is always novel, and therefore may be easily mistaken. It takes genius to recognize genius; and most of Wordsworth's critics were not men of genius. Landor, who was one, made a wise remark upon this point. He said, "To compositions of a new kind, like Wordsworth's, we come without scales and weights, and without the means of making an assay."