ART of every sort, according to my previous contentions, is an attempt to rationalize some emotional conflict in the artist’s mind. When the painter says “That’s really good to paint” and carefully arranges his still life, he has felt a sort of antagonism between the separate parts of the group and is going to discover by painting on what that antagonism is founded, presenting it as clearly and simply as he knows how, in the slightly distorting haze of the emotion aroused. He never says, “I think I’ll paint a jug or bottle, next,” any more than the poet says “I’ve a free morning on Saturday; I’ll write an ode to the Moon or something of that sort, and get two guineas for it from the London Mercury.” No, a particular jug or bottle may well start a train of thought which in time produces a painting, and a particular aspect of the moon may fire some emotional tinder and suggest a poem. But the Moon is no more the subject of the poem than the murder of an Archduke was the cause of the late European War.

Wordsworth’s lines “I wandered lonely as a cloud” are, as he would have said, about “something more” than yellow daffodils at the water’s brim. I have heard how schoolmasters and mistresses point out in the “Poetry Lesson” that the whole importance of this poem lies in Wordsworth’s simple perception of the beauty of Spring flowers; but it seems to me to be an important poem only because Wordsworth has written spontaneously (though perhaps under his sister’s influence) and recorded to his own satisfaction an emotional state which we all can recognize.

These daffodils have interrupted the thoughts of an unhappy, lonely man and, reminding him of his childhood, become at once emblems of a golden age of disinterested human companionship; he uses their memory later as a charm to banish the spectres of trouble and loneliness. I hope I have interpreted the poem correctly. Let us now fantastically suppose for the sake of argument that Wordsworth had been intentionally seeking solitude like a hurt beast hating his kind, and had suddenly come across the same daffodil field: he surely might have been struck with a sudden horror for such a huge crowd of flower-faces, especially if his early memories of flower picking had been blighted by disagreeable companionship and the labour of picking for the flower market. He would then have written a poem of exactly the opposite sense, recording his sudden feeling of repulsion at the sight of the flowers and remarking at the end that sometimes when he is lying on his couch in vacant or in pensive mood, they flash across that inward eye which is the curse of solitude,

For readers to whom he could communicate his dislike of daffodils on the basis of a common experience of brutal companionship in childhood and forced labour, the poem would seem a masterpiece, and those of them who were schoolmasters would be pretty sure to point out in their Poetry Lessons that the importance of the poem lay in Wordsworth’s “perception of the dreadfulness of Spring Flowers.”

Again the scholastic critic finds the chief value of Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality” in the religious argument, and would not be interested to be told that the poet is being disturbed by a melancholy contradiction between his own happy childhood, idealistic boyhood and disappointed age. But if he were to go into the psychological question and become doubtful whether as a matter of fact, children have not as many recollections of Hell as of Heaven, whether indeed the grown mind does not purposely forget early misery and see childhood in a deceptive haze of romance; and if he therefore suspected Wordsworth of reasoning from a wrong premise he would have serious doubts as to whether it was a good poem after all. At which conclusion even the most pagan and revolutionary of modern bards would raise a furious protest; if the poem holds together, if the poet has said what he means honestly, convincingly and with passion—as Wordsworth did—the glory and the beauty of the dream are permanently fixed beyond reach of the scientific lecturer’s pointer.