A lot of critics have had negative things to say about Wordsworth’s negatives. ‘Wordsworth carries his delight in negatives to the point of tiresome mannerisms’, John Jones grumbled.1 Geoffrey Hartman once blamed ‘a negative’ for Wordsworth’s ‘wavering rhythm’; Roger Sharrock thought there were ‘too many’ of them; Kenneth Johnston has spoken of Wordsworth’s ‘bothersome double negatives’; and for Carey McIntosh, more recently, they can ‘seem verbose’.2 Such complaints are understandable. Negatives (single or double or even triple: ‘Nor can I not believe but that…’3) make a reader’s life that little bit more difficult, and they also can sound, as Orwell knew, gallingly pompous: ‘banal statements are given an appearance of profundity by means of the not un- formation’.4 A favourite phrase of Wordsworth’s, ‘not seldom’, once you have stopped to think it through, means ‘not not often’, as though ‘often’ alone would not have been suitably cumbersome.5 ‘’Twas not indifferent to a youthful mind’ (Prelude IV. 192) sounds patently unyouthful. A ‘track … not untrod before’ (III. 121) should hardly be a remarkable track, you would assume, for having been trod before. ‘Not unwelcome’ (VI. 14) is not especially welcoming. Something ‘not unworthy’ (VI. 154) feels less than worthy, if not quite unworthy. A ‘Mansion not unvisited of old’ (VI. 222) plainly is a mansion visited of old. ‘[T]he end | Was not ignoble’ (I. 343-4), Wordsworth says after plundering a bird’s nest, and somehow the claim falls short (unhinged by guilt?) of celebrating a noble end.
But often critics who speak negatively about Wordsworth’s negatives (and so perform a kind of double negative) end up saying something positive about them too, as though celebration inevitably infiltrates condemnation. Jones is lead to hail ‘the unmathematical nature of language. If two minuses make a plus, it is a special kind of plus: the negative form can be on its own account heart-piercing’ (p. 204). Hartman speaks elsewhere of ‘the special negativity of Wordsworth’s style’.6 For Johnston, Wordsworth’s negatives ‘are functional, not sloppy craftsmanship’ (p. 19), and Sharrock goes so far as to say that ‘the roughness of style … is often a merit’.7 If such remarks amount to a dubious sort of praise (since something is thought good but not exactly not bad), these critics nonetheless find a power in negativity, style in verbosity, eloquence in roughness. To look again at Wordsworth’s negatives is to be reminded of their ungainliness, for sure, but also of the special kinds of pluses and minuses they make.
