﻿WOKDSWORlTl'S MIND 



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ence between them. Wordsworth 's theory about humble and rustic 

 life as matter for imaginative poetry is not just Crabbe's realistic 

 creed. While it is evident that both poets strike a similar monoto- 

 nous tone in such stories as Margaret's, Michael's, Ellen Orford's, 

 Phoebe Dawson's, where the authors are, perhaps, too much inter- 

 ested in the rag-tag of realistic observation, family connections of 

 their characters, and so forth, still they are not alike even here. 

 One is merely realistic, the other is realistic and something else. 

 Neither is this statement of mine intended to be disparaging to 

 Crabbe; for I do not necessarily prefer Wordsworth's trick of 

 enveloping his peasantry in a pathetic glamor to Crabbe's repres- 

 sion of all glamor and his emphasis of cold fact. The point is that 

 to contemporary critics these differences seemed especially marked. 



Crabbe 's realism and Wordsworth 's imaginative coloring, in the 

 treatment of low and rustic life, was the subject of Lord Jeffrey's 

 contrast of the two, and ridicule of Wordsworth in 'The Edin- 

 burgh Review' for April, 1808. Each poet had put much of his 

 best work before the public. Lord Jeffrey's comparisons are very 

 fallacious, but they bring out the point that he thought Words- 

 worth's characters so fanciful as to bear no relation to the humble 

 rustics of Crabbe, and his poetry to have no value as simple and 

 realistic language, but to be merely 'prose run mad.' 'Mr. Crabbe,' 

 says Jeffrey, 'exhibits the common people of England pretty much 

 as they are, and as they must appear to every one who will take 

 the trouble of examining into their condition ; at the same time that 

 he renders his sketches in a very high degree interesting and beau- 

 tiful — by selecting what is most fit for description. * * * Mr. 

 Crabbe, in short, shows us something which we have all seen, or may 

 see, in real life ; and draws from it such feelings and such reflec- 

 tions as every human being must acknowledge that it is calculated 

 to excite. He delights us by the truth, and vivid and picturesque 

 beauty of his representations, and hy the force and pathos of the 

 sensations with which we feel that they are connected. Mr. Words- 

 worth and his associates, on the other hand, introduce us to beings 

 whose existence was not previously suspected by the acutest ob- 

 servers of nature ; and excite an interest for them — where they do 

 ' excite any interest — more by an eloquent and refined analysis of 

 their own capricious feelings, than by any obvious or intelligible 

 ground of sympathy in their situation.' The injustice of Words- 

 worth's early reviewers is not in their ridicule of his maundering 

 stanzas about an idiot boy, but in their failure to comprehend that 

 here was a developing philosophy of the poetic art, which was ar- 



