, in his "equable,
sustained, and internal" manner of recitation, under the ash-trees
of Alfoxden Park. I do not know whether it has been noted that the
landscape of _Peter Bell_, although localised in Yorkshire by the
banks of the River Swale, is yet pure Somerset in character. The poem
was composed, without a doubt, as the poet tramped the grassy heights
of the Quantock Hills, or descended at headlong pace, mouthing and
murmuring as he went, into one sylvan combe after another. To give it
its proper place among the writings of the school, we must remember
that it belongs to the same group as _Tintern Abbey_ and _The Ancient
Mariner_.

Why, then, was it not issued to the world with these? Why was it
locked up in the poet's desk for twenty-one years, and shown during
that time, as we gather from its author's language to Southey, to
few, even of his close friends? To these questions we find no reply
vouchsafed, but perhaps it is not difficult to discover one. Every
revolutionist in literature or art produces some composition in which
he goes further than in any other in his defiance of recognised rules
and conventions. It was Wordsworth's central theory that no subject
can be too simple and no treatment too naked for poetic purposes. His
poems written at Alfoxden are precisely those in which he is most
audacious in carrying out his principle, and nothing, even of his, is
quite so simple or quite so naked as _Peter Bell_.

Hazlitt, a very young man, strongly prejudiced in favour of the new
ideas, has given us a notion of the amazement with which he listened
to these pieces of Wordsworth, although he was "not critically nor
sceptically inclined." Others, we know, were deeply scandalised. I
have little doubt that Wordsworth himself considered that, in 1798,
his own admirers were scarcely ripe for the publication of _Peter
Bell_, while, even so late as June 1812, when Crabb Robinson borrowed
the MS. and lent it to Charles Lamb, the latter "found nothing good in
it." Robinson seems to have been the one admirer of _Peter Bell_ at
that time, and he was irritated at Lamb's indifference. Yet his own
opinion became modified when the poem was published, and (May 3, 1819)
he calls it "this _unfortunate_ book."[1] In another place (June 12,
1820) Crabb Robinson says that he implored Wordsworth, before the book
was printed, to omit "the party in a parlour," and also the banging of
the ass's bones, but, of course, in vain.

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