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IJs^DIAXA UXIYEESITY STUDIES 



not attempt to render objects more consonant to nature ; it only 

 accentuated their strangeness. WordsAvortli 's art was a deeper and 

 a simpler art. Tt is made to stand, in Walter Bagehot's Avell known 

 essay on ' The Pure, the Ornate, and the Grotesque, ' as the example 

 of the pure ; and it is true that though it looks frequently, as all ro- 

 mantic art does, to the strange and the remote, it was with a clear 

 vision and in a spirit which, far from accentuating these things 

 by strange colors, sought rather to harmonize them with fun- 

 damental tones of nature. It is true that Wordsworth could not 

 long at a time maintain the perfect balance of qualities that purifies 

 art, and that though, in contrast to Tennyson and Browning, he 

 may be best characterized by the word pure, he might appear in 

 contrast with certain Greek poets or with Goethe as uneven and 

 whimsical, yet I do not feel that his whimsicality is an immature 

 whimsicality or that his lack of balance is youthful. These things 

 are too largely results of his theories of art, not of the vagaries of 

 mere romantic youth. AVhen Matthew Arnold said that the ele- 

 ment of immaturity in the romantic poetry of the first quarter of 

 the nineteenth century might seriously undermine its claim to per- 

 manence in our literature, I think he had in mind the expression 

 of that over-enthusiasm of youth, which is so captii^ating in its 

 freshness, but so capricious and unsatisfying, even so stale, in 

 time. It was a sort of immaturity that found an adequate vehicle 

 for its emotions in the lure of the bizarre and the remote. Words- 

 worth 's poetry tends to purity and permanence, in so far as he did 

 not emphasize such things for their own sake but tried to render 

 them consonant with the rest of nature. It tends to whimsicality 

 and lack of balance, in so far as the illustrations he chose were 

 those of a theorist pressing his theory to extremes.^ 



1 I have in mind liere the contrast made by such poems as 'Lncy Gray.' A 

 Slumber Did My Spirit Seal.' 'The Solitary Reaper,' with such poems as 'Strange 

 Fits of Passion Have I Known.' 'To My Sister.' 'Goody Blake and Harry Gill.' A 

 comparison of the finest of Wordsworth's lyrics with those of Goethe that might 

 appropriately be set beside them is another way of defining the Wordsworthian 

 romanticism. The lyrics of both poets are equally GeJegenheifs-gedichte. having, as 

 Goethe put it in regard to his poems, their root and base in reality. "Of poems 

 conjured out of the air I make no account.' he says : and also this : 'The young 

 poet must do himself some sort of violence to get out of the mere general idea.' 

 Both men write from this point of view, but with what different result. Words- 

 worth's peculiar personal experience remains his own— and a trifle peculiar still: 

 Goethe's takes on more of the universality, less of the idiosyncracy of art. Take 

 two poems with the same final idea. "The Daffodils' and •Heidenrosleiu the first 

 will tell from now till eternity Wordsworth's peculiar experience, the second is a 

 universal symbol, struck out with far simpler and far greater skill. One may not 

 generalize, however, from such illustrations. It would be hard to say, for example, 

 in regard to the question of man's relation to nature as symbolized in 'The Prelude' 

 and in the second part of 'Faust,' which poet is more idiosyncratic in his answer. 



