with a vast amount of
disagreement in detail; and Mr. Arnold's own estimate, as where he
compares Wordsworth with Moliere (who was not a poet at all, though he
sometimes wrote very tolerable verse), weighs him with poets of the
second class like Gray and Manzoni, and finally admits him for his
dealings with "life," introduces fresh puzzlements into the valuation.
There is only one principle on which that valuation can properly
proceed, and this is the question, "Is the poet rich in essentially
poetical moments of the highest power and kind?" And by poetical moments
I mean those instances of expression which, no matter what their
subject, their intention, or their context may be, cause instantaneously
in the fit reader a poetical impression of the intensest and most moving
quality.

Let us consider the matter from this point of view.[4]

The chief poetical influences under which Wordsworth began to write
appear to have been those of Burns and Milton; both were upon him to the
last, and both did him harm as well as good. It was probably in direct
imitation of Burns, as well as in direct opposition to the prevailing
habits of the eighteenth century, that he conceived the theory of poetic
diction which he defended in prose and exemplified in verse. The chief
point of this theory was the use of the simplest and most familiar
language, and the double fallacy is sufficiently obvious. Wordsworth
forgot that the reason why the poetic diction of the three preceding
generations had become loathsome was precisely this, that it had become
familiar; while the familiar Scots of Burns was in itself unfamiliar to
the English ear. On the other hand, he borrowed from Milton, and used
more and more as he grew older, a distinctly stiff and unvernacular form
of poetic diction itself. Few except extreme and hopeless Wordsworthians
now deny that the result of his attempts at simple language was and is
far more ludicrous than touching. The wonderful _Affliction of Margaret_
does not draw its power from the neglect of poetic diction, but from the
intensity of emotion which would carry off almost any diction, simple or
affected; while on the other hand such pieces as "We are Seven," as the
"Anecdote for Fathers," and as "Alice Fell," not to mention "Betty Foy"
and others, which specially infuriated Wordsworth's own contemporaries,
certainly gain nothing from their namby-pamby dialect, and sometimes go
near to losing the beauty that really is in