in which the
style is uncongenial or impossible to him. Indeed if he mistakes he is
soon weeded out; the editor rejects, the age will not read his
compositions. How painfully this traditional style cramps great writers
whom it happens not to suit, is curiously seen in Wordsworth, who was
bold enough to break through it, and, at the risk of contemporary
neglect, to frame a style of his own. But he did so knowingly, and he
did so with an effort. 'It is supposed,' he says, 'that by the act of
writing in verse an author makes a formal engagement that he will
gratify certain known habits of association; that he not only then
apprizes the reader that certain classes of ideas and expressions will
be found in his book, but that others will be carefully eschewed. The
exponent or symbol held forth by metrical language must, in different
ages of literature, have excited very different expectations; for
example, in the age of Catullus, Terence, or Lucretius, and that of
Statius or Claudian; and in our own country, in the age of Shakespeare
and Beaumont and Metcher, and that of Donne and Cowley, or Pope.' And
then, in a kind of vexed way, Wordsworth goes on to explain that he
himself can't and won't do what is expected from him, but that he will
write his own words, and only his own words. A strict, I was going to
say a Puritan, genius will act thus, but most men of genius are
susceptible and versatile, and fall into the style of their age. One
very unapt at the assimilating process, but on that account the more
curious about it, says:--

How we
Track a livelong day, great heaven, and watch our shadows!
What our shadows seem, forsooth, we will ourselves be.
Do I look like that? You think me that: then I AM that.

What writers are expected to write, they write; or else they do not
write at all; but, like the writer of these lines, stop discouraged,
live disheartened, and die leaving fragments which their friends
treasure, but which a rushing world never heeds. The Nonconformist
writers are neglected, the Conformist writers are encouraged, until
perhaps on a sudden the fashion shifts. And as with the writers, so in
a less degree with readers. Many men--most men--get to like or think
they like that which is ever before them, and which those around them
like, and which received opinion says they ought to like; or if their
minds are too marked and oddly made to get into the mould, they give up
reading altogether, or read old b