No More Learning

Then, since Wordsworth published
some verses by his sister Dorothy in his own volumes, other unpublished
fragments by Miss Wordsworth may find a place in this edition. I do not
attach much importance, however, to the recovery of these unpublished
poems. The truth is, as Sir Henry Taylor--himself a poet and critic of
no mean order--remarked [17],

"In these days, when a great man's path to posterity is likely to be
more and more crowded, there is a tendency to create an obstruction,
in the desire to give an impulse. To gather about a man's work all the
details that can be found out about it is, in my opinion, to put a
drag upon it; and, as of the Works, so of the Life. "

The industrious labour of some editors in disinterring the trivial works
of great men is not a commendable industry. All great writers have
occasionally written trifles--this is true even of Shakespeare--and if
they wished them to perish, why should we seek to resuscitate them?
Besides, this labour--whether due to the industry of admiring friends,
or to the ambition of the literary resurrectionist--is futile; because
the verdict of Time is sure, and posterity is certain to consign the
recovered trivialities to kindly oblivion. The question which should
invariably present itself to the editor of the fragments of a great
writer is, "_Can these bones live_? " If they cannot, they had better
never see the light. Indeed the only good reason for reprinting the
fragments which have been lost (because the author himself attached no
value to them), is that, in a complete collection of the works of a
great man, some of them may have a biographic or psychological value.
But have we any right to reproduce, from an antiquarian motive, what--in
a literary sense--is either trivial, or feeble, or sterile?

We must, however, distinguish between what is suitable for an edition
meant either to popularise an author, or to interpret him, and an
edition intended to bring together all that is worthy of preservation
for posterity. There is great truth in what Mr. Arnold has lately said
of Byron:

"I question whether by reading everything which he gives us, we are so
likely to acquire an admiring sense, even of his variety and
abundance, as by reading what he gives us at his happier moments.
Receive him absolutely without omission and compromise, follow his
whole outpouring, stanza by stanza, and line by line, from the very
commencement to the very end, and he is capable of being tiresome.
"
[18]

This is quite true; nevertheless, English literature demands a complete
edition of all the works of Byron: and it may be safely predicted that,
for weightier reasons and with greater urgency, it will continue to call
for the collected works of Wordsworth.

It should also be noted that the fact of Wordsworth's having dictated to
Miss Fenwick (so late as 1843) a stanza from 'The Convict' in his note
to 'The Lament of Mary Queen of Scots' (1817), justifies the inclusion
of the whole of that (suppressed) poem in such an edition as this.

The fact that Wordsworth did not republish all his Poems, in his final
edition of 1849-50, is not conclusive evidence that he thought them
unworthy of preservation, and reproduction. It must be remembered that
'The Prelude' itself was a posthumous publication; and also that the
fragmentary canto of 'The Recluse', entitled "Home at Grasmere"--as well
as the other canto published in 1886, and entitled (most prosaically)
"Composed when a probability existed of our being obliged to quit Rydal
Mount as a residence"--were not published by the poet himself. I am of
opinion that his omission of the stanzas beginning:

Among all lovely things my Love had been,

and of the sonnet on his 'Voyage down the Rhine', was due to sheer
forgetfulness of their existence. Few poets remember all their past,
fugitive, productions. At the same time, there are other
fragments,--written when he was experimenting with his theme, and when
the inspiration of genius had forsaken him,--which it is unfortunate
that he did not himself destroy.

Among the Poems which Wordsworth suppressed, in his final edition, is
the Latin translation of 'The Somnambulist' by his son. This will be
republished, more especially as it was included by Wordsworth himself in
the second edition of his "Yarrow Revisited. "

It may be well to mention the 'repetitions' which are inevitable in this
edition,

(1) As already explained, those fragments of 'The Recluse'--which were
issued in all the earlier volumes, and afterwards incorporated in 'The
Prelude'--are printed as they originally appeared.

(2) Short Notes are extracted from Dorothy Wordsworth's 'Recollections
of a Tour made in Scotland' (1803), which illustrate the Poems composed
during that Tour, while the whole text of that Tour will be printed in
full in subsequent volumes.

(3) Other fragments, including the lines beginning,

Wisdom and Spirit of the universe,

will be printed both by themselves in their chronological place, and in
the longer poem of which they form a part, according to the original
plan of their author.

A detail, perhaps not too trivial to mention, is that, in this
edition--at the suggestion of several friends--I have followed the
example of Professor Dowden in his Aldine edition, and numbered the
lines of almost all the poems--even the sonnets. When I have not done
so, the reason will be obvious; viz. either the structure, or the
brevity, of the poem. [19]

In giving the date of each poem, I have used the word "composed," rather
than "written," very much because Wordsworth himself,--and his sister,
in her Journals--almost invariably use the word "composed"; although he
criticised the term as applied to the creation of a poem, as if it were
a manufactured article.