﻿woedswoeth's :mind 



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sil)ilities. his failure to achieve that sort of success is clue to his 

 being bent on enlarging his consciousness for ideal social relations 

 beyond all possibility of concordance with actual social conditions. 

 He is too far in advance of his age to be anything for it but a 

 prophet without honor. He is not a popular leader. In him there 

 always remains the element of difference, of strangeness, and it is 

 this he rejoices in. It is this that distinguishes him from the crowd, 

 that feeds his egotism. All this is typical of the romantic attitude, 

 and not inconsistent with the attempt to modify the conventional 

 and the stale by comparisons with the individual and the unobvious. 

 It cannot have "success." for success is a word coined by the blind 

 present. 



Now. as applied to the view of nature, the fundamental charac- 

 teristic of AVordsworthian romanticism is its attempt to make by 

 readjustment a balance between the conventional and the individual 

 in art. Is not this what Pater's definition of the romantic element 

 in art. as strangeness added to beauty, has in mind? And is not 

 AVordsworth "s aesthetic doctrine of adding strangeness to beauty, 

 in such a way as to make them more consonant, part of the same 

 principle ? For that is his aesthetic doctrine. It is the purport of 

 his prefaces, of many of his utterances in verse, and of casual dis- 

 cussions of the function of poetry in his letters. He explains it in 

 one way when he says it was his intention to throw over incidents 

 of common life 'a certain coloring of imagination whereby ordinary 

 things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect. ' He 

 illustrates it in such a poem as 'Lucy Gray' and in the note we have 

 already remarked which he prefixed to it. In a letter to Christo- 

 pher North, in 1800, he quotes the following lines, 



And even the boding owl 

 That hails the rising moon has charms for me, 



in order to show that what was once regarded as merely strange 

 and grotesque, and not to be naturally admired in poetry — such a 

 thing as the oavI "s cry — will in time be naturally admired ; in other 

 words that it will lose the ideas of mere strangeness once attached 

 to it. And, "Wordsworth then says, "a great poet ought to . . . 

 rectify men's feelings, to give them new compositions of feeling, to 

 render their feelings more sane and permanent, in short, more con- 

 sonant to nature, that is. to external nature and the great moving 

 spirit of things. He ought to travel before men occasionally as 

 well as at their side.' 



The revived Gothic taste, interested in grotesciue exteriors, did 



