Aristotle is of use to the critic only as one poet -a great poet-is of use to another. It is good to see a master at work. But the material in which the literary critic works is still poetry itself. That a poet should be made from other poets without opening his eyes on life and the world is inconceivable. He will not even follow their methods too exactly, lest he should falsify his own gift of vision. And the material in which criticism works is as abundant and diverse and incomprehensible as life itself; it is life reflected in the mind

of man.

When King Asa removed his mother from being queen because she had made an idol in a grove, and when he destroyed his mother's idol and burnt it by the brook Kidron, the high places, it is further recorded, were not removed. The critic, in every age, spends his zeal in vain in destroying his mother's idols, while the high places are not removed. And they are maintained not so much by the self-importance of the few who desire to speak from them as by the laziness of the many, who are easily content with an arrangement that provides them with opinions, and saves them from the unwelcome necessity of thinking. It is not uncommon to meet with persons, simple in speech and not widely read, who are born critics; they have the instinct for the essential, and the sympathy that enables them at once to set them

selves at the author's point of view; but most of them are careful to disclaim all authority; they have read but little, they say, and their tastes and opinions are uncultivated, and probably wrong. It is perhaps a distorted form of the same diffidence which makes the critics themselves seek shelter from the ordeal of being left alone with a poem. They call in a bodyguard of stalwart authorities to protect them from that direct, intimate, and trustful converse which the poet seeks.

These remarks on the failings of criticism are germane to the subject, for Wordsworth felt these things. He desired to appeal from the public, whose brains are bemused with a little learning, to the people, whose taste he held is still natural and uncorrupted. But the people have not time for poetry, and his dream of an edition of his poems in the form of chap-books, to be eagerly bought from wandering hawkers, is still a dream. For his educated readers, who came to him in the expectation that he would give them a familiar pleasure, and "gratify certain known habits of association," he did all that in him lay. He warned them to abate these expectations and to put off this mood. When they neglected his advice he consoled himself with the thought that a poet must create the taste by which he is ultimately judged.

Here, surely, is ground enough for inquiry.

The critic who comes to his task with fixed principles and standards is already disqualified, in the opinion of Wordsworth himself, to appreciate the most characteristic merits of the poems. Either Wordsworth was the victim, during sixty years devoted wholly to poetry, of a lamentable illusion, or he has something to teach that will repay pupilage. He was a man of a steady mind, and the chance that he was not deceived seems to warrant an experiment. Such an experiment can take only one form. The critic must go back with him to the starting-point, and, by the aid of his own writings and the writings that throw light on his life and purposes, must watch his poems in the making.

A lifetime of strenuous poetic energy cannot be recaptured from oblivion or fully understood. But if the attempt be wholly vain and fantastic, then Wordsworth must be content to be judged by standards that he repudiated, and to be valued for reasons that have little to do with the inspiration and motive of his work.

CHAPTER 1

CHILDHOOD AND EDUCATION

By his autobiographical poem, the Prelude, written between the thirtieth and the thirty-fifth years of his age, Wordsworth has released the critic from a world of conjecture and research. No such another authentic and minute poetic biography exists, it may safely be said, in any tongue. The genius of Wordsworth was a genius that naturally turned inward upon itself; and in this psychological account of the growth of his own mind, and of the most significant of the influences that shaped it, he has done the biographer's work once and for all. It would be foolish to challenge the truth of his account, and, so far as the critic's task is concerned, it would be vain to try to supplement it. He lived, it is true, for some forty-five years after the completion of the Prelude, and it is right that the chances and changes of that later time, the story of his various travels, and of the tardy honours that were heaped

upon him when he had ceased to sing, should, in fit place, be set down. For the understanding of his great poetic adventure, and for the appreciation of the wonderful passages in which that adventure was partly achieved, the history of his first thirty years is all that need be studied.

It is not merely that the formative period of a poet's life must always be the period of chief interest; in the life of Wordsworth no other period presents any interest at all. His life was meditative, uneventful, secluded, and, after its early passions and agonies, ran its course undiverted and unthwarted to the end. But the great passion that sealed him to poetry and opened his eyes on nature and man lost something of its virtue. The Prelude, as he says in the advertisement, "conducts the history of the Author's mind to the point when he was emboldened to hope that his faculties were sufficiently matured for entering upon the arduous labour which he had proposed to himself." But the labour itself, though time was not denied him, was never brought to completion. Nine years after the Prelude there appeared the Excursion, and then-an end. The other two books that, together with the Excursion, were to make up the great philosophical poem on man, nature, and society, were barely attempted. One fragment of the first book remains, while as for the third book, "the materials of which it would have been

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