Wordsworth's Folly

Granted, many of Wordsworth's critics and parodists have been sceptical about this risky comic business; the Smith brothers prefaced their skit on Wordsworth in Rejected Addresses with these lines from Richard Cumberland: "thou art Folly's counterfeit, and she/ Who is right foolish hath the better plea;/ Nature's true Idiot I prefer to thee." According to the OED, he can be a "natural fool," one "congenitally deficient in reasoning powers," or "a professional fool or jester," and Wordsworth has the tradition of the holy fool in mind when he writes to John Wilson about his Idiot Boy: "I have often applied to Idiots, in my own mind, that sublime expression of scripture that,'their life is hidden with God.' In Observations on Man (1749), David Hartley suggested that the most natural occasion for derisive laughter is "the little mistakes and follies of children", but this laughter is checked when we realise that they are rightly following the dictates of nature rather than custom: "we often take notice of this, and correct our- selves, in consequence of being diverted by it." (i.440-1) Friedrich Schiller echoed and extended the point when con- sidering the naïve expressions and actions of the child in his essay "On Naive and Sentimental Poetry': "[M]ockery of in- genuousness yields to admiration of simplicity. [...]arises the entirely unique phenomenon of a feeling in which joyous mockery, respect, and melancholy are com- pounded . .