INTRODUCTION

Appreciation of Wordsworth's poetry depends in an unusual degree upon knowing when and for what purposes it was written. He was a man of keen sensibility and strong impulses, who felt bound to express in verse the opinions which he held on great subjects; and as these opinions changed, his utterance varied. Not only figuratively but literally "the fashion of his countenance was altered" in accordance with his views on human progress, character, and destiny. Compare his portrait by Shuter, showing him as he was at about twenty-eight, with any of those painted after he had passed the age of forty-five, and you will find it hard to believe that they represent the same man. Of the alert, enthusiastic radical, dressed like a French Republican, wearing his long hair unpowdered as a protest against the war-tax, scarce a trace remains in the resigned yet somewhat apprehensive saint portrayed by Pickersgill. The difference is not due entirely to age, but rather to a change in the passions that ruled the man. Curiosity has given place to meditation; confidence in himself and human beings generally has faded away, and if in its stead there has descended faith in some higher power, this faith has been dearly purchased.

Wordsworth was endowed with fine senses; seeing and hearing were to him a perpetual feast. He was much affected also by the persons who surrounded him, quickly caught and powerfully drawn by the currents of thought that swirled about him; and if he often appeared to stand too long anchored here or there, it was not because he felt no inward impulse to move, but because loyalty and native obstinacy caused him to hold on with all his might to old objects of enthusiasm. Some men have been substantially the same at all periods of their lives; what their youth promised their maturity has fulfilled. With Wordsworth this was not the case, so far at least as his opinions and

motives are concerned. Certain physical and moral traits no doubt remained unaltered, such, for example, as his rich perceptions and his love of honesty and simplicity; but at various points in the course of his development he faced towards different directions, and his works cannot be understood by one who does not know the varied purposes which determined from time to time their subjects and their forms. Wordsworth himself is described in his own words when he declares that the Poet is a man "endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind." Furthermore, with all his attention to the external world and the unequalled accuracy of his account of what he saw and heard, the report that he really makes is about himself, the effect upon his own mind. In giving us primarily a record of his mental states, rather than pretending to tell what really happened outside, he was treating his subjects in a truly scientific as well as poetical way and with uncommon fairness to his readers.

These, then, are the reasons why we must have considerable knowledge of his life, the circumstances and persons that influenced his life, the changing ideals and purposes of his life, if we are to understand his poetry. Everyone, therefore, who desires really to know the meaning of Wordsworth's poems should, while reading them, bear in mind the dates of their composition. Wordsworth himself arranged them in a most unsatisfactory grouping, according to a psychological system of his own invention. It is the one defect of the Oxford edition, which has been employed for the text of the present volume of selections, that its learned editor, Thomas Hutchinson, felt constrained to adopt the poet's classification. The chronological order, which we have unhesitatingly used, is better, even though it involves giving a prominent place to several immature juvenile poems, important for critical and biographical reasons rather than for artistic excellence.

The following outline may serve to show the main points at which Wordsworth's life, and consequently his poetry, underwent change. He was born at Cockermouth in the county of Cumberland, in 1770; spent the best part of his

boyhood as a boarder in the village of Hawkshead, among the mountains, attending a remarkably simple and pleasant classical school; entered St. John's College, Cambridge, in 1787; made a long journey on foot through France, Switzerland, and Northern Italy, with a fellow-student, in the summer of 1790; graduated in 1791; lived obscurely in London for some months; went to France again for about a year, coming back to London just before the execution of Louis XVI and the outbreak of war between England and the French Republic early in 1793; left at Orleans or Blois a French lady, Annette Vallon, who had borne him a child and to whom he apparently intended to return for the purpose of marrying her; published An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches in 1793; was closely associated with a group of British revolutionists, and led a wandering life until he settled with his sister, in September, 1795, at a farmhouse called Racedown, in Dorset; met Samuel Taylor Coleridge in that year; went to live near him in Somersetshire, in 1797; published jointly with him a little book of their poems, called Lyrical Ballads, in 1798.

Here it seems wise to pause and take breath. Let us look back over these twenty-eight years and see what they meant for poetry. In the present volume the period before Wordsworth went to France and became a convert to the Revolutionary doctrine of human equality is represented chiefly by the long descriptive poem, An Evening Walk. It was begun at Hawkshead, in 1787, and was written in the style (later called by Wordsworth and Coleridge "Gaudyverse," in contempt) which had prevailed in English poetry since the death of Milton; and yet it contains promising indications of naturalness and bold simplicity. Descriptive Sketches, which, like An Evening Walk, is reprinted here from the first edition and not as it was afterwards softened down by the poet, was written while he was in the full fervor of Revolutionary enthusiasm, and so was Guilt and Sorrow. They abound in democratic and pacifistic doctrine. It should be noted that while Descriptive Sketches contains many of those poetic licenses and bookish substitutes for plain speech which may well be called "Gaudyverse," the diction and sentence-structure of Guilt and Sorrow are free from conventionality, being carefully simple.

The subjects and characters treated in this latter poem are also such as a propagandist of democracy would be likely to choose. With hardly any exceptions all the poems Wordsworth composed between 1791 and 1802 were made with the same intention. The young poet was a man of principle; his principles were those of Revolutionary France; he was convinced that the distinctions between rich and poor, high and low, were false and cruel; he deliberately preferred to write about events that might happen every day and people who could be encountered everywhere; and furthermore he believed that a poet should avoid the use of expressions which could be understood only by readers of a particular class. Thus from his political principles he derived a literary theory which was destined to affect the whole course of English poetry for at least one hundred and thirty years.

A considerable number of the poems dating from the decade that began in 1795 were devoted to the joys and sorrows of the poor. The poet makes note of their peculiar relation to the world, studying the way in which want has crippled them; but, what is even more unusual, he treats them as if their poverty were the least significant thing about them, for he portrays them as in no essential respect different from other people. He does not make them speak in dialect, nor does he attribute to them a peculiar cast of mind or suppose them incapable of the same feelings that animate men and women to whom wealth has brought leisure and education. Such poems are The Reverie of Poor Susant, Alice Fell, Simon Lee, The Old Cumberland Beggar, The Pet Lamb, and The Sailor's Mother. Alice Fell, because of its stark simplicity, has been generally misunderstood. Some have declared that its purpose is to prove the importance of private property as a support for morality and happiness, by way of recantation of the writer's previous utterances in favor of more or less communistic views. Others see in it no purpose and are disappointed. The full title which Wordsworth himself gave it ought to settle the question: Alice Fell, or Poverty. It is plainly a sympathetic illustration of the pathos of extreme penury, drawn with realism so complete as to baffle the still-existing admirers of "Gaudyverse."

In Resolution and Independence, which is more widely known by the more attractive though less explanatory title of The Leech Gatherer, Wordsworth turns upon himself and asks whether it is safe and really good that he should continue trying to carry out in practice his theory that a simple and economically unproductive life is the best. He had been acting almost literally upon that command which so few Christians even pretend to obey: "Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on;" and the possible consequences alarmed him. The poem tells how he threw off his depression and recovered "faith in the whispers of the lonely Muse." We learn from the triumphant conclusion that William Wordsworth, the defiant foe of conventionality, the resolutely independent and unworldly man, the trusting child of Nature, was still holding his own.

There were, besides Coleridge, two human influences which have left deep traces in Wordsworth's poetry written during this great decade: that of his sister, Dorothy, whose presence is not only seen in several pieces like the lines To My Sister, The Sparrow's Nest, and Tintern Abbey, where she is mentioned, but is felt in many others; and the unknown child Lucy whom he once loved and lost.

Coleridge, with characteristic hospitality of mind, gave a genial welcome to Wordsworth's views, which, it should be remembered, were little less than seditious in a country that was after all governed by a form of monarchy, a country, moreover, engaged in war with France. To Wordsworth's interest in political and social reform, was now added an interest in psychology, and we find that most of the poems he composed before 1799 are illustrations of a particular theory about the constitution and operation of the human mind. He and Coleridge, accepting the teaching of Locke, Hartley, and Hume, believed that all human knowledge originated in the perceptions made by the five senses; that these perceptions grouped themselves together into ideas and principles, hopes, fears, and beliefs, by some process of association; and that there were no innate ideas. We Are Seven was written to prove that a child, contrary to what had been taught for centuries by orthodox philosophers,