The bad poet can more
easily urge that his thoughts are too advanced for mankind to
appreciate than that his melody is too sweet for their ears to catch.
And when the gift vanishes no poet is willing to confess that it is
gone; so humiliating is it to lose power over mankind by the loss of
something which seems quite independent of intellect or character.
And yet so it is. For some twenty years at most (1798--1818),
Wordsworth possessed this gift of melody. During those years he
wrote works which profoundly influenced mankind. The gift then left
him; he continued as wise and as earnest as ever, but his poems had
no longer any potency, nor his existence much public importance.
Humiliating as such reflections may seem, they are in accordance
with actual experience in all branches of art. The fact is that the
pleasures which art gives us are complex in the extreme. We are
always disposed to dwell on such of their elements as are explicable
and can in some way be traced to moral or intellectual sources. But
they contain also other elements which are inexplicable, non-moral,
and non-intellectual, and which render most of our attempted
explanations of artistic merit so incomplete as to be practically
misleading.
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