In November "The Borderers" was finished, and Wordsworth
went up to London with his sister to offer it for the stage. The good
Genius of the poet again interposing, the play was decisively rejected,
and Wordsworth went back to Allfoxden, himself the hero of that first
tragi-comedy so common to young authors.
The play has fine passages, but is as unreal as Jane Eyre. It shares with
many of Wordsworth's narrative poems the defect of being written to
illustrate an abstract moral theory, so that the overbearing thesis is
continually thrusting the poetry to the wall. Applied to the drama, such
predestination makes all the personages puppets and disenables them for
being characters. Wordsworth seems to have felt this when he published
"The Borderers" in 1842, and says in a note that it was "at first written
... without any view to its exhibition upon the stage." But he was
mistaken. The contemporaneous letters of Coleridge to Cottle show that he
was long in giving up the hope of getting it accepted by some theatrical
manager.
He now applied himself to the preparation of the first volume of the
"Lyrical Ballads" for the press, and it was published toward the close of
1798. The book, which contained also "The Ancient Mariner" of Coleridge,
attracted little notice, and that in great part contemptuous.
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