﻿Ill 



Wordsworthian Romanticism 



From the foregoing description of the Wordsworthian note in 

 eighteenth century verse, it may appear that typical Wordsworthian 

 sentiment for nature is too thoroughly moralized to be romantic 

 sentiment. Too thoroughly, or, perhaps better, too soon. Words- 

 worth 's spiritual frugality, as Mr. Hutton called it, would not allow 

 his imagination to run long at will before withdrawing it to the 

 moral aspect of the case. He meditates, says Mr. Hutton, but he 

 does not allow himself to dream. 'He hoarded his joys, and lived 

 upon the interest which they paid in the form of hope and expecta- 

 tion. ' This does not describe the temper of a romanticist. For 

 while we commonly associate a delight in remote and wild scenery, 

 such as Wordsworth had in abundance, with the romantic temper, 

 we commonly think of it as delight purely for its own sake — a pur- 

 poseless or spendthrift delight, not the pleasure of a man who 

 hoarded his joys. Romantic piorposelessness, we feel, is a logical 

 phrase ; romantic moral purpose seems like a contradiction in terms. 



But there is only a seeming contradiction here. The Romantic 

 Movement was a moral purpose ; and the moral purpose in Words- 

 worth 's poetry is the poetry itself, as is always true of any great 

 art. Not to have a moral purpose in this sense, at once debars 

 poetry from being great art, because it debars it from meaning any- 

 thing whatever that is inherent in the meaning of art. Thus if the 

 current phrase, romantic purposelessness, means anything at all, it 

 means not art for art's sake, but it means that the purpose of a 

 certain form of romantic poetry is to have no purpose and thereby 

 fulfil an aim of art. The absurdity of this is not wholly dissimilar 

 to the absurdity of any statement that defines Wordsworth as no 

 romanticist because of his moral purpose. 



Another method of certain critics of setting Wordsworth out- 

 side the current of romantic tendency is to define romanticism so 

 specifically that it does not apply to any of the great figures of the 

 Romantic Movement. I do not quarrel with definitions of roman- 

 ticism, as such; but I do quarrel with the application to the ten- 

 dencies of the Romantic Movement of a definition of romanticism 

 that does not fit them. For example, if we have been asked to ac- 



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