The Moral of Landscape

‘This will never do.’ ¹ There is no more famous opening to a review. There are few hatchet jobs so comprehensive and so witty. Twentieth-century opinion has tended to follow Francis Jeffrey: who now reads The Excursion? In 1879 Matthew Arnold definitively ranked Wordsworth as inferior only to Shakespeare and Milton. But with this canonization came a narrowing of the canon: ‘The Excursion and The Prelude, his poems of greatest bulk, are by no means Wordsworth’s best work.’ ² The Prelude, excluded from the canon in Wordsworth’s lifetime, made extraordinarily little impact when published in 1850, but its stock has risen and risen since the 1920s. Shares in The Excursion, however, have remained depressed for a century. Arnold invented the conception of the ‘great decade’ and Wordsworth’s subsequent decline; the notion that The Excursion is a product of the decline, a great white elephant, provides a convenient excuse for not reading what is after all a very long poem. Yet Coleridge said that ‘proofs meet me in every part of The Excursion that the poet’s genius has not flagged’ and that ‘one half of the number of its beauties would make all the beauties of all his contemporary poets collectively mount to the balance’, ³ Keats considered the poem to be one of the three things in the age to rejoice at, ⁴ and Hazlitt, who had no reason to do Wordsworth any favours, began his review with a sentence very different from Jeffrey’s: ‘In power of intellect, in lofty conception, in the depth of feeling, at once simple and sublime, which pervades every part of it, and which gives to every object an almost preternatural and preterhuman interest, this work has seldom been surpassed.’ ⁵ Nor was such high praise confined to the period of the poem’s first publication: in 1843 Ruskin, in a letter to his college tutor, said that ‘the magnificent comprehension and faultless majesty of The Excursion’ crowned all of Wordsworth’s work. ⁶