﻿wokdswoeth's mind 



23 



cept, as a definition of romanticism, the revival of the mediaeval 

 spirit of wonder and awe about nature, and then are told that, 

 when applied to the Romantic Movement, the definition does not 

 permit us to see widely where this spirit of wonder may lead, there 

 is reason to quarrel with this manner of application. Such a defi- 

 niition would, in itself, obviously give one little to say of Words- 

 vvorthian romanticism, and Professor Beers, to take a case in point, 

 keeping strictly within the limits of such a definition, can dismiss 

 Wordsworth in a phrase or two. In fact, it is part the irony of 

 definitions that the limits of his book on English Romanticism do 

 not allow him to come into intimate relations with any of the great 

 poets of the romantic period except Keats and two lesser great 

 ones, Scott and Coleridge. It is possible that Professor Beers would 

 say in reply that so far as poets of that period were essentially ro- 

 mantic they were not great. And I am well aware that there is 

 little honor to be had among the critics nowadays through belong- 

 ing to the romantic school. Has not a certain group of ardent 

 Wordsworthians, with Matthew Arnold as chief, delighted to show 

 by one academic means or another that Wordsworth was not of the 

 monotonously adolescent, the youthfully stale, tribe? 



I, however, shall make no attempt to rescue Wordsworth — and 

 I claim to be an ardent Wordsworthian as well as a romantic — 

 from the stream of tendency in his age. His own attempts to rescue 

 himself often landed him rather too high and dry. In spite of any 

 mere definition of the romantic spirit, such as Professor Beers 

 takes, or any merely academic similarities such as I have been 

 detecting between Wordsworth and his unromantic predecessors, 

 Wordsworth himself is a romanticist. 



Does not poetic energy, in Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, for ex- 

 ample, spring from an emotional egotism that seeks its milieu of 

 sympathy and expression in surrounding nature, especially in its 

 wilder or less obvious aspects, discovering there symbols for a read- 

 justment in the relationship of man with nature and of man with 

 society ? Is not this a tendency evidenced in the larger proportion 

 of their serious work, 'The Ancient Mariner,' 'Promethus Un- 

 bound,' and 'Manfred,' being but prominent instances? If this 

 is a true analysis, then Wordsworth is the poet pai' excellence of 

 this tendency; and it is, I believe, the chief tendency in the Ro- 

 mantic Movement, 



But if anyone must quarrel with this statement, let me say the 

 same thing finally in another way : Will not Wordsworth 's relation 

 to romanticism show the relation of the new movement, (whatever 



