which he required persuasion even to publish. He wrote, with Canning in 1797-98 the better part of the 'Anti-Jacobin'; then, still anonymously, in 1817 the 'Prospectus and Specimen of an intended National Work, by William and Robert Whistlecraft, of Stow-Market, in Suffolk, harness and collar-makers, intended to comprise the most interesting particulars relating to King Arthur and his Round Table,' afterwards called 'The Monks and the Giants'; and, as late as 1831, practically for private circulation, the first part of his translation of Aristophanes, done ten years earlier. A translation and commentary on 'Theognis' was published in 1845 to 'show the Germans that an Englishman can do something, though not exactly in their own way.' As lately as forty years ago, an American, Mr. Charles Eliot Norton, found in 'The Monks and the Giants' 'one of the most playful, humorous, and original poems in English, a perfect success in its kind, and that kind one of the rarest and most difficult.' And he reports to us Coleridge's preference for the superior metrical skill of the poem as compared with Byron's imitation in 'Beppo.' Perfect technique there is, and a wellbred quality of pleasantry which is perhaps the most distinguished kind of nonsense-making that we have had. But can it be read to-day with anything like the interest with which we can read 'Beppo'? To compare it with 'Don Juan' would be out of the question: the great poem, owing the origin of its form to him, which Frere tried to suppress, on moral grounds, before publication. Frere tells us that his intention was to introduce a new kind of burlesque into English, using the stanza of 'Morgante Maggiore,' which had lain dormant in England since the Elizabethan age, and had never been used then for more than plain narrative purposes. It was to be such burlesque as we get in Sancho Panza: 'the burlesque treatment of lofty and serious subjects by a thoroughly common but not necessarily low-minded man-a Suffolk harness-maker.' Southey rightly defined the result as 'too good in itself and too inoffensive to become popular; for it attacked nothing and nobody.' People tried to find a meaning in it, and resented so well-bred and generalised a joke. It has indeed none of the qualities that live, and has become an instructive fossil. It did what new and perfect technique can sometimes do: it set a fashion in poetry. It gave Byron exactly the weapon and plaything he was in want of. 'Whistlecraft,' he wrote in 1818, 'was my immediate model'; from Whistlecraft he turned back to Berni, and from Berni to 'the parent of all jocose Italian poetry,' Pulci. But when he took the form from Frere he took it ready-made; he had only to fill it with his own energy and exuberance. Frere was one of the scholars of letters who create nothing for themselves, but discover many things for others. Having discovered a form for Byron, and invented, with Canning, a scholarly and brilliant manner of parody in the 'Anti-Jacobin,' he attempted little more except translation, an art for which he was peculiarly fitted, and, as it was his nature to do, the translation of perhaps the most difficult of all poets to render, Aristophanes. It was his opinion that 'the talent and attainments requisite are not of the highest order, and if we add to these a natural feeling of taste, and a disposition to execute the task, with the degree of perfection of which it is capable, it should seem, that little else would be requisite.' It is with these modest words that he anticipates a series of translations, interspersed with notes, commentaries, and copious stagedirections, of 'the half-divine humourist,' as Mr. Swinburne has called him, 'in whose incomparable genius the highest qualities of Rabelais were fused and harmonised with the supremest gifts of Shelley.' Only Mr. Swinburne himself, in the translation of the chorus of Birds to which these words. were appended, has so far shown us the possibility of going beyond Frere's sinuous versatility and fine speed and vivid fooling. I cannot but think that it is from his rhymes that Barham and Gilbert learnt some of their technique of nonsense rhyming. Few translators have had so just a conception of the laws of that delicate and sensitive art, which he has defined in these words: The language of translation ought, we think, to be a pure, impalpable, and invisible element, the medium of thought and feeling, and nothing more; it ought never to attract attention to itself; hence all phrases that are remarkable in themselves, either as old or new, are as far as possible to be avoided.' Speech and rhythm are alike brought to an extraordinary flexibility, the blank verse really doing, with its artful crowdings and elisions, precisely that familiar service which Leigh Hunt and others were then fumbling after. The hand on it is firm enough to loosen it to its full length; it never strays from the leash. WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1770-1850) 1 SINCERITY Was at the root of all Wordsworth's merits and defects; it gave him his unapproachable fidelity to nature, and also his intolerable fidelity to his own whims. Like Emerson, whom he so often resembled, he respected all intuitions, but, unlike Emerson, did not always distinguish between a whim 1 (1) An Evening Walk, 1793. (2) Descriptive Sketches, 1793. (3) Lyrical Ballads, with a few other Poems, 1798. (4) Lyrical Poems, with other Poems, 2 vols., by W. Wordsworth, 1800. (5) Lyrical Ballads, with Pastoral and other Poems, 2 vols., 1802. (6) The Excursion, being a portion of The Recluse, a Poem, 1814. (7) Poems, 2 vols., 1815. (8) The White Doe of Rylstone; or The Fate of the Nortons, 1815. (9) Thanksgiving Ode, 1816. (10) Peter Bell, a tale in verse, 1819. (11) The Waggoner, 1819. (12) The River Duddon, a Series of Sonnets: Vaudracour and Julia: and other Poems, 1820. (13) The Miscellaneous Poems of William Wordsworth, 4 vols., 1820. (14) Ecclesiastical Sketches, 1822. (15) Poetical Works, 5 vols., 1827. (16) Yarrow Revisited, 1835. (17) Poetical Works 6 vols., 1836-37. (18) The Sonnets of William Wordsworth, 1838. (19) Poems chiefly of Early and Late Years; including The Borderers, a Tragedy, 1842. (20) Ode, performed in the Senate House, Cambridge, 1847 (21) The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet's Mind; an Autobiographical Poem, 1850. (22) The Recluse (posthumous), 1888. (23) Complete Poetical Works, 1888. and an intuition. His life was spent in a continual meditation, and his attitude towards external things was that of a reflective child, continually pondering over the surprise of his first impressions. I once heard Mr. Aubrey de Vere, who had been a friend of Wordsworth for many years, say that the frequent triviality of Wordsworth's reflections was due to the fact that he had begun life without any of the received opinions which save most men from so much of the trouble of thinking; but had found out for himself everything that he came to believe or to be conscious of. Thus what seems to most men an obvious truism not worth repeating, because they have never consciously thought it, but unconsciously taken it on trust, was to Wordsworth a discovery of his own, which he had had the happiness of taking into his mind as freshly as if he had been the first man and no one had thought about life before; or, as I have said, with the delighted wonder of the child. Realising early what value there might be to him in so direct an inheritance from nature, from his own mind at its first grapple with nature, he somewhat deliberately shut himself in with himself, rejecting all external criticism; and for this he had to pay the price which we must deduct from his ultimate gains. Wordsworth's power of thought was never on the level of his power of feeling, and he was wise, at least in his knowledge of himself, when he said: 'One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man, Than all the sages can.' He felt instinctively, and his feeling was nature's. But thought, coming to him thus immediately as it did, and representing the thinking part of himself with unparalleled fidelity, spoke out of an intellect by no means so responsive to the finer promptings of that supreme intellectual energy of which we are a part. It is thus often when he is most solemnly satisfied with. himself that he is really showing us his weakness most ingenu ously: he would listen to no external criticism, and there was no inherent critical faculty to stand at his mind's elbow and remind him when he was prophesying in the divine language and when he was babbling like the village idiot. Wordsworth desired to lead a continuously poetic life, and it seemed to him easy, inevitable, in one whose life was a continual meditation. It seemed to him that, if he wrote down in verse anything which came into his mind, however trivial, it would become poetry by the mere contact. His titles explain the conviction. Thus the beautiful poem beginning, 'It is the first mild day of March,' is headed, to my Sister. Written at a small distance from my house, and sent by my little boy.' In its bare outline it is really a note written down under the impulse of a particular moment, and it says: 'Now that we have finished breakfast, let us go for a walk; put on a walking dress, and do not bring a book; it is a beautiful day, and we should enjoy it.' Some kindly inspiration helping, the rhymed letter becomes a poem: it is an evocation of spring, an invocation to joy. Later on in the day Wordsworth will fancy that something else in his mind calls for expression, and he will sit down and write it in verse. There it will be; like the other it will say exactly what he wanted to say, and he will put it in its place among his poems with the same confidence. But this time no kindly inspiration will have come to his aid; and the thing will have nothing of poetry but the rhymes. What Wordsworth's poetic life lacked was energy, and he refused to recognise that no amount of energy will suffice for a continual production. The mind of Coleridge worked with extraordinary energy, seemed to be always at high thinking power, but Coleridge has left us less finished work than almost any great writer, so rare was it with him to be able faultlessly to unite, in his own words, 'a more than usual state of emotion with more than usual order.' Wordsworth was unconscious even of the necessity, or at least of the part played by skill and patience in waiting on opportunity as it comes, and seizing it |