It is not probable that Wordsworth at any period in his youth would rather have been Caesar than Dante. To have the world at one's absolute commandment for power and pleasure is the desire of most virile natures, and a desire seldom renounced by the highest intelligences, however closely disgrace and misery may dog them to the end. Accordingly, when intellect, health, and strength abdicate their heritage of the world we look for some tragic circumstance compulsive. In the case of Wordsworth we look in vain. The worst that befell him was the failure of his hopes in the French Revolution. He never sent down a personal root into the busy world at all: but had from the beginning a primitive-Christian contempt for power and wealth. His reluctance--it lasted for two years--to take up the burden of poetry is to be ascribed to the shame and horror of their destiny which great poets feel. A great poet fights against his fate as high women fight against passion. There is degradation and dismay in the ministration of poetry as in "the ruddy offices of love"; but both the woman and the poet yield: for love and poetry, being of the race, are stronger than the individual.
Wordsworth's immorality, like all dynamic immorality, was what is called a return to nature. He wrote with perfect insight concerning poetry. There are many pregnant and convincing passages in his letters and prefaces: but I question if he ever found the terms characteristic of his own innovation. He said: "It may be safely affirmed that there neither is nor can be any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition." Boldly, but not safely; and the substitution of "metrical composition" for "poetry" is distinctly equivocal. The discovery Wordsworth made was this:--That poetry is the least artificial of the arts; that, compared with music, painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry is not an art at all. Given an artist, the first condition of the arts proper is the possession of mechanical means. But the poet requires none; no pencils, colours, canvas, compasses, strings, or pipes. Language, the vehicle of his no-art, is part of the poet's, as of all men's, birthright; like food and air, he has it. And when he requires to supplement the language with which the conditions of existence endue him, the founts are ready: there are no grapes to gather: that is not the winepress the poet must tread: he has only to drink from the sources of utterance. Thus poetry, like an artesian well, broaches the heart of Matter directly, and is its most intimate expression. It is almost sacrilegious to call poetry an art. Without any intermediary of violins, drums, trumpets, oils, palettes, brushes, mallets, chisels, furnaces, scaffolds, and conditioned only by language, the poet can utter that which is: the heart and the brain, the flesh, the bones and the marrow--Matter become subconscious, conscious, and self-conscious--are the orchestra and canvas of the poet's music and vision; marble and bronze, the Parthenon and Notre Dame, are misleading, unstable, and fleeting expressions of man and nature compared with poetry. The more I think of the true substance of poetry, the more impossible it is for me to see the necessity of Wordsworth's affirmation: and his own poetry, as has long been recognized, gives it the lie effectually.