WORDSWORTH'S CORRECTIONS.
When an author, in his later editions, departs from his earlier text, he is apt to reveal some traits of his method and genius that might not otherwise have been so evident, and a poet's corrections may thus have more than a merely curious interest. Take Mr. Tennyson's, for instance: "The Princess," to say nothing of his shorter emended poems, has been, one might say, rewritten since the first edition, and his corrections are always interesting. Yet they spring, I think, from a narrower range of motive than Wordsworth's; they are directed more exclusively toward the object of artistic finish; they commonly show the poet busied in casting perfume upon the lily. Take this example from "The Miller's Daughter." In the first version of that poem, as it appeared in 1842, we are told that before the heroine's reflection became visible in the mill-pool—
A water-rat from off the bank Plunged in the stream.
Later editions give us this more graceful version of what occurred:
Then leapt a trout. In lazy mood I watch'd the little circles die; They passed into the level flood, And there a vision caught my eye.
Unquestionably that is an improvement, and of a sort which Wordsworth was continually making. But Wordsworth's corrections do not merely illustrate the effort to reach artistic finish, though very many of them are made with that intent; they have a relation to his theories, tastes, creeds, to his temperament and training, to his manner of receiving friendly or hostile criticism; and in comparing these textual variations we seem to watch the artist at his work—to enter in some sort into his very consciousness—as we see him manipulating the form or the thought of his verses:
Τὰ δὲ τορνεύει, τὰ δὲ κολλομελεῖ, καὶ γνωμοτυπεῖ, κᾀυτονομάζει.
Nor is this to consider too curiously; Wordsworth himself has invited us to the task. In his letters as well as in the notes to his poems, frequent mention is made of these labors of emendation. Writing in 1837 to Edward Quillinan, he asks him to "take the trouble ... of comparing the corrections in my last edition [that of 1836] with the text in the preceding one," "in the correction of which I took great pains," as he had written to Prof. Reed a month before. And there is ample opportunity of this sort; I do not know an ampler one of the kind in the works of any other poet. Tasso's variæ lectiones are numerous, but they were mostly made to conciliate his critics; Milton's are of great interest, but they are comparatively few in number, and Gray's are fewer still: Pope's are numerous, but not often interesting; while Tennyson's, as I have intimated, seem to me to spring from a less serious poetic faculty than Wordsworth's, and are therefore less significant. But I am anxious not to claim too much significance for Wordsworth's corrections, for I can do little more here than to point out some of them, leaving for the most part their interpretation to the reader. To attempt more than this would be to enter upon an analysis of Wordsworth's genius, for which this is not the occasion.
And yet we shall see, I think, that his genius might be in some sort "restored," as naturalists say, were it necessary, from these fragmentary data, for Wordsworth's corrections cover the whole term of his literary activity. He preferred, one might say, to correct after publication rather than before; and, revising his youthful writing during a second and a third generation following, his final texts had received the benefit of more than half a century of criticism by himself and others. From the year 1793, in which his first volumes appeared, the "Evening Walk" and the "Descriptive Sketches," to the year of his death, 1850, he put forth not fewer than twenty-four separate publications in verse, each of which contained more or less of poetry previously unpublished; and in the greater number of these texts may be found variations from the previous readings. The larger part of them, indeed, are slight—the change of single words, the alteration of phrases, the transposition of verses or stanzas. And yet few of them, I think, are quite without interest for persons in whose reading, as Wordsworth himself expresses it, "poetry has continued to be comprehended as a study." I have noted some thousands of his corrections; but a copious citation of them might weary all but actual students of poetic technique, a class that is hardly as numerous, I suspect, as that of the actual practitioners of poetry, and I will therefore keep mainly to such variæ lectiones as may be referred to motives of more general interest.[B]
The first question which we naturally ask about Wordsworth's corrections is this: Were they improvements? My readers will decide for themselves; for my own part, it seems to me that they generally were improvements; that Wordsworth bettered his text three times out of four when he changed it. Nor is this surprising; few admirers of Wordsworth's poetry will deny that there were many passages quite susceptible of amendment in it; for that task there was ample room. But on the other hand, it happened not infrequently, as we might expect, that when the poet returned, in the critical mood, to mend his first form of expression, he marred it instead. In the poem, for instance, beginning, "Strange fits of passion have I known," the second stanza as originally published ran thus:
When she I loved was strong and gay, And like a rose in June, I to her cottage bent my way, Beneath the evening moon.
—Lyrical Ballads, 1800.
The passage stood thus for many years, and was finally altered to read:
When she I loved looked every day Fresh as a rose in June, I to her cottage bent my way, Beneath an evening moon.
Is there not some loss of vividness here? The later reading is perhaps the more graceful, and yet the picture seems to me brighter in the early version. This, too, seems a doubtful improvement; it occurs in "The Farmer of Tilsbury Vale." Wordsworth wrote at first:
His staff is a sceptre—his gray hairs a crown: Erect as a sunflower he stands, and the streak Of the unfaded rose is expressed on his cheek.
—1815.
In later editions we read:
His bright eyes look brighter, set off by the streak Of the unfaded rose that still blooms on his cheek.
Here the last line is bettered; but I, for one, am sorry to lose the sunflower comparison; it is picturesque, and it aptly describes this hearty child of the earth.
Look now at the poem "We are Seven," as it began in the "Lyrical Ballads":
A simple child, dear brother Jim, That lightly draws its breath, And feels its life in every limb— What should it know of death?
It is now sixty years since "dear brother Jim" was dismissed from his place in these lines—dismissed, perhaps, with the less compunction because the stanza was written by another hand—Coleridge's—as an introduction to the rest of the poem. But I think the lines were better as the young poets first sent them forth. "Brother Jim" had, perhaps, no clearly demonstrable business in the poem; and yet, having been there, we miss him now that he is gone. That homely apostrophe had in it the primitive impulses of the Lake school feeling; the phrase refuses to be forgotten, and seems to have a persistent life of its own. I have seen the missing words restored, in pencil marks, to their rightful place in the text of copies belonging to old-fashioned gentlemen who remembered the original reading. Nor can we easily deny existence to our "dear brother Jim"; his name still lingers in our memories, haunting about the page from which it was excluded long ago; he lives, and deserves to live, as the symbol of immortal fraternity.
But as I have said, Wordsworth mended his text oftener than he marred it, and first by refining upon his descriptions of outward nature. Among the cases in point, one occurs in a poem entitled "Influences of Natural objects in calling forth and strengthening the Imagination in Boyhood and early Youth"—a cumbrous heading enough. May I digress for a moment upon the unlucky titles which Wordsworth so often prefixed to his poems, and the improvements occasionally made in them? Surely a less convenient caption than the one just quoted is not often met with, or a less attractive one than this other, prefixed to an inscription not very many times longer than itself:
"Written at the Request of Sir George Beaumont, Bart., and in his Name, for an Urn, placed by him at the termination of a newly-planted Avenue in the same Grounds."
Titles like these are not only fatiguing in the very reading, a preliminary disenchantment, but they are not properly names at all; they are headings, rubrics, captions which do not name. Wordsworth seems to send forth these unlucky children of the muse with a full description of their eyes, hair, and complexion, but forgets to christen them; and I believe that this oversight, though it may not appear a very serious one, has interfered more than a little with the effectiveness of his minor poetry, and consequently with the fame and influence of the poet. For it makes reference to them difficult, almost impossible: how is one to refer to a favorite passage, for instance, in a poem "Written at the Request of Sir George Beaumont, Bart., and in his Name, for an Urn, placed by him at the termination of a newly-planted Avenue in the same Grounds"? These titles are fit to discourage even the admirers of Wordsworth, and to repel his intending students; nor will they attract any one, for they are formless; they are the abstracts of essays, the précis of an argument, rather than fit designations for works of poetic art. A considerable number, too, of Wordsworth's minor pieces remain without name, title, or description of any kind whatever. If that desirable thing, a satisfactory edition of his poems, should ever appear, it will be given us by some editor who shall be sensitive to this northern formlessness, and who may venture, perhaps, to improve the state of Wordsworth's titles.
Let me end this digression by noting another singular title, with its emendation. In the "Lyrical Ballads" of 1798 appeared a poem with this extraordinary caption:
"Anecdote for Fathers, shewing how the art of Lying may be taught."
Now, certainly, Wordsworth did not intend to teach the art of lying, yet nothing can be clearer than his declaration. He failed to see the ludicrous meaning of these words, and it took him thirty years, apparently, to find out what he had said; but he saw it at last, and dropped the explanatory clause of the title, quoting in its place an apt motto from Eusebius; and we now read:
"Anecdote for Fathers. Retine vim istam, falsa enim dicam, si coges;" and the charming story professes no longer to show how boys may be taught to lie, but to point out the danger of making them lie when you press them to give reasons for their sentiments.
And now, returning to the corrections of text in the descriptive passages, let us note a curious change in the poem already mentioned, "On the Influence of Natural Objects," etc. Wordsworth is describing the pleasures of skating; and these are some of them, according to the passage as originally published in "The Friend":
Not seldom from the uproar I retired Into a silent bay—or sportively Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng To cut across the image of a Star That gleamed upon the ice.
To do this is of course impossible, and the lines which I have italicized are mere closet description. We cannot skate across the reflection of a star until we can skate into the end of a rainbow; and the curious thing is that the so-called "poet of nature" should ever have fancied, even for a moment at his desk, that he had ever done it. Clearly, Wordsworth's study was not always out of doors, to use a favorite phrase of his; on the contrary, this passage is so unreal that a critic unacquainted with the personal history of the poet might argue that he had never been on skates—as Coleridge wrote the "Hymn in the Valley of Chamouni" without ever visiting that valley. But Wordsworth seems to have found out that his description was false; for he made a compromise, in the later editions, with the optical law of incidence and reflection; and we now see him attempting merely, but not achieving, the impossible thing:
——Leaving the tumultuous throng To cut across the reflex of a star That fled, and, flying still before me, gleamed Upon the glassy plain.
But Wordsworth held stoutly, in the main, to his own experience, his own impressions; and he did this even to the injury of his descriptions. He was never, for instance, in sailor's phrase, "off soundings"; he never saw the mid-ocean; and consequently, when he described Leonard, in the first edition of "The Brothers," as sailing in mid-ocean, he says that he gazed upon "the broad green wave and sparkling foam." But he found out his mistake at last; he was fond of reading voyages and travels, and he seems to have become convinced finally, perhaps by the testimony of his sailor brother, that the deep sea was really blue and not green; that the common epithet was the true one; for he corrected the line to read "the broad blue wave."
Let us now examine some of those curiously prosaic passages which Wordsworth strove faithfully to convert into poetry, and strove with various success. And first, those famous arithmetical passages in "The Thorn," one of which stands to-day as it stood in the "Lyrical Ballads." We still read there, indeed, of
A beauteous heap, a hill of moss, Just half a foot in height,
the precise altitude that Wordsworth gave it in 1798; not an inch to the critics, he seems to have said. But these other peccant lines in the preceding stanza he recast, and in a way that is curious to follow:
And to the left, three yards beyond, You see a little muddy Pond Of water never dry: I've measured it from side to side: 'Tis three feet long, and two feet wide.
Of these lines Crabb Robinson said to Wordsworth that "he dared not read them aloud in company." "They ought to be liked," rejoined the poet. Well, we may not like them; but they are interesting, for they present a really instructive specimen of bad art. Clearly enough, here is a poet in difficulties. The "little muddy pond" was not a pond in nature, but a pool; and a pool it would have been in verse, but for the particular exigency—the necessity of rhyming with the word beyond. Note now the honesty of our poet. For rhyme's sake he has temporarily sacrificed accuracy; he has called a pool a pond; but to show what the piece of water actually was, that actually it was a pool, though the exigencies of rhyme had forced him to call it provisionally by another name, he goes on to give us its accurate measurement, not only from "side to side," but from end to end as well. "'Tis three feet long and two feet wide," he tells us; and now his northern conscience is satisfied; he seems to say, "I was unfortunately compelled to use the wrong word in this passage, but I make amends at once; these are the precise dimensions of the object, and you can give it the right name yourself." This devotion to the topographical truth of the matter was abated, however, in later editions, perhaps by the derision of the critics. Wordsworth rewrote the passage, one would say, to please the graces rather than the mathematical verities; and the lines now read thus:
You see a little muddy pond Of water, never dry, Though but of compass small, and bare To thirsty suns and parching air.
Another considerable improvement was made, a little further on, in the same poem. These are the lines as they ran in the "Lyrical Ballads":
Poor Martha! on that woful day A cruel, cruel fire, they say, Into her bones was sent; It dried her body like a cinder, And almost turned her brain to tinder.
—1798.
Certainly there was room for improvement here; and in the edition of 1815 we find the lines recast as follows:
A pang of pitiless dismay Into her soul was sent; A Fire was kindled in her breast, Which might not burn itself to rest.
Or see again this prosaic passage from "The Brothers," as first published in the "Lyrical Ballads." The lines describe the parting of James from his companions at a certain rock:
——By our shepherds it is call'd the Pillar. James, pointing to its summit, over which They all had purposed to return together, Inform'd them that he there would wait for them; They parted, and his comrades pass'd that way Some two hours after, but they did not find him At the appointed place, a circumstance Of which they took no heed.
—1800.
It would occur to few readers to call this poetry were it not visibly divided into verse; and Wordsworth himself seems to have thought as much, for after many years he rewrote the passage, condensing and poetizing it as follows:
——By our shepherds it is called The Pillar. Upon its airy summit crowned with heath The loiterer, not unnoticed by his comrades, Lay stretched at ease; but, passing by the place On their return, they found that he was gone. No ill was feared.
There are hundreds of corrections in this style; and we naturally ask what made it necessary for Wordsworth to weed his poetic garden so often, to amend with care and trouble what some other poets would have done well at first? We need not hold with some of his critics that Wordsworth had in any peculiar sense a dual nature, to explain the amount of prosaic poetry, if I may call it so, that he wrote. No real poet ever wrote, as I take it, a greater amount of prosaic poetry than he; and no real poet ever published a greater number of verses that might fairly be called not only poor poetry, but considered as proof that their author could not write good poetry at all.
What critic would believe before the proof, that the poet who had written the lines just quoted from "The Thorn," and others like them, could have written also the "Lines to H. C." and "She Was a Phantom of Delight"? But to inquire at length into this contrast is to inquire into the deepest traits of Wordsworth's genius. One cause of his prosaic verse, however, may be mentioned here. Wordsworth had injurious habits of composition; he dictated his prose to an amanuensis, and he composed his poems in the fields as he walked. He was thus a libertine of opportunity, and though he strictly economized his subjects, and made the least yield him up its utmost, yet he was prodigal in the quantity of his expression. He did not wait for what are called moments of inspiration; he was always ready to compose, and thus he composed too much; he made verses whenever he was out of doors, "murmuring them out" to the astonishment of the rustics. Doubtless the first factor of genius is this abundance of power. But, on the other hand, the control, the direction of power is the first essential to the beauty of the work of art. "Good men may utter whatever comes uppermost; good poets may not," says Landor; and the aphorism touches upon a serious fault of Wordsworth's method. He lacked due power of self-repression; he was too much interested in his own thoughts to make a sufficiently jealous choice among them when he came to write them down. Two qualities, indeed, of his nature he kept in such abeyance, the amative and the humorous—and he was not without a humorous side—as to express but little of them in his writings. But he seems to have recorded almost everything, not humorous or amatory, that came into his mind; and, in consequence, we feel that his poetry comes perilously near being a verbatim transcript of his processes of consciousness. But no man's thought is always sufficiently valuable for a shorthand report; and we often wish that Wordsworth had reflected, with Herrick, that the poet is not fitted every day to prophesy:
No; but when the spirit fills The fantastic pannicles Full of fire—then I write As the Godhead doth indite.
Does it seem an invidious task to recall the unhappy readings that I have mentioned—readings abandoned by Wordsworth long ago, and unknown to many of his younger students? To do it with slighting intent, or from mere curiosity, would be unworthy; nor will the routine mind be persuaded that there is anything more than a merely curious interest in the comparison of editions. We, thinking that Wordsworth cannot really be understood in a single edition, must leave the routine mind to its conviction that one text contains all that there is of value in his poetry. And to offset the ungraceful verses that we have just considered, let us look at some changes by which Wordsworth has made fine passages finer still. Of the sonnets published in 1819 with "The Waggoner," none is more striking, as I think, than the one beginning, "Eve's lingering clouds extend in solid bars." In it at first he spoke as follows of the reflection of the heavens at night in perfectly still water:
Is it a mirror?—or the nether sphere Opening its vast abyss, while fancy feeds On the rich show?—But list! a voice is near; Great Pan himself low-whispering through the reeds.
In the later editions this passage is enriched by a grand stroke of imagination:
Is it a mirror?—or the nether sphere Opening to view the abyss in which she feeds Her own calm fires?—But list! a voice is near; Great Pan himself low-whispering through the reeds.
The following change is from the same sonnets; the passage describes a bright star setting:
Forfeiting his bright attire, He burns, transmuted to a sullen fire That droops and dwindles; and, the appointed debt To the flying moments paid, is seen no more.
So in 1819; in later editions we find the passage as follows:
He burns, transmuted to a dusty fire, Then pays submissively the appointed debt To the flying moments, and is seen no more.
That is scarcely an improvement; but the alteration of epithet is curious: the substitution of fact for fancy in changing the low star's "sullen fire" into a "dusty fire."
Here, again, is a case where the new reading has a fresher phrase than the old. It occurs in the last stanza of "Rob Roy's Grave," where Wordsworth spoke thus of the hero's virtues:
——Far and near, through vale and hill, Are faces that attest the same; And kindle, like a fire new-stirred, At sound of Rob Roy's name.
Later, a new line was substituted as follows:
——Far and near, through vale and hill, Are faces that attest the same; The proud heart flashing through the eyes At sound of Rob Roy's name.
And Wordsworth insisted, quite as strongly as his severest critics, upon finish, upon literary art as discriminable from the substance. While he was blaming Byron, Campbell, and other eminent poets for its lack, his assailants were loud in the same charge against him; they protested that whatever other merits the new poetry might have, that of artistic finish was surely not one. Jeffrey wrote in 1807 that Wordsworth "scarcely ever condescended to give the grace of correctness or melody to his versification." But Wordsworth, in a letter lately first published, criticises Campbell's "Hohenlinden" in a way that shows him by no means unstudious of form. He writes thus to Mr. Hamilton:[C] "I remember Campbell says, in a composition that is overrun with faulty language, 'And dark as winter was the flow of Iser rolling rapidly'; that is, 'flowing rapidly.' The expression ought to have been 'stream' or 'current.'... These may appear to you frigid criticisms," he adds; "but depend upon it, no writings will live in which these rules are disregarded." This is good doctrine, and we have seen Wordsworth striving to realize it in his practice. He did realize it to a certain extent; if his style was not always eloquent, not always poetical, it was generally better English than that of his popular contemporaries. And yet a critic in "The Dial," following, as recently as 1843, the lead of Jeffrey in this blame of Wordsworth, could write of him as follows:[D] "He has the merit of just moral perception, but not that of deft poetic execution. How would Milton curl his lip at such slip-shod newspaper style! Many of his poems, as for example the 'Rylstone Doe,' might be all improvised.... These are such verses as in a just state of culture should be vers de Société, such as every gentleman could write, but none would think of printing." That passage is worth reading twice; note the condescension of the praise, the flippancy of the blame, the inaccurate English and French; and what a jaunty misquotation of Wordsworth's title! It was not very profitable censure; but Wordsworth received much criticism by which he was glad to profit. Let us look at some of the cases in which he turned the strictures of friends or of enemies to account. The changes that he made in deference to criticism are striking, and so too are some of the cases in which he refused to profit by criticism. I will speak of both.
Of the former kind are the corrections in "Laodamia." That poem appeared first in 1815, having been suggested during a course of classical reading which Wordsworth had taken up for the purpose of directing the studies of his son. Landor criticised this poem in the first volume of his "Imaginary Conversations," and in the main very favorably; he makes Porson say that parts of it "might have been heard with shouts of rapture in the regions he describes"; he calls it "a composition such as Sophocles might have delighted to own." But he points out blemishes in two stanzas, the first and the seventeenth; he blames the execution of one and the thought of the other. Wordsworth rewrote both of them, and I quote the second passage as affording the more interesting change. In the first edition Protesilaus, says the poet, returning from the shades to visit Laodamia,
Spake, as a witness, of a second birth For all that is most perfect upon earth.
On this Landor remarks, putting the words into Porson's mouth:
How unseasonable is the allusion to witness and second birth, which things, however holy and venerable in themselves, come stinking and reeking to us from the conventicle. I desire to see Laodamia in the silent and gloomy mansion of her beloved Protesilaus; not elbowed by the godly butchers in Tottenham court road, nor smelling devoutly of ratafia among the sugar bakers' wives at Blackfriars.
Wordsworth dropped these lines; and we now read instead, that the hero
Spake of heroic arts in graver mood Revived, with finer harmony pursued.
In the first volume of his "Imaginary Conversations" Landor said of Wordsworth: "Those who attack him with virulence or with levity are men of no morality and no reflection." In a later volume, however, Landor attacks him thus himself, with both virulence and levity, as I fear we must say, and Wordsworth declined to profit by these later gibing criticisms, though some of them, and especially those upon the "Anecdote for Fathers," were valuable, and suggested real improvements of text. In this attack, which is contained in the second conversation of Southey and Porson, Landor had noticed Wordsworth's adoption of his earlier criticism of Laodamia; and this circumstance was probably a reason why Wordsworth refused to receive further critical favors at his hands. The poem "Goody Blake and Harry Gill," for instance, sharply criticised by Landor, stood almost untouched through the editions of fifty years. And in a letter of 1843, recently published for the first time,[E] Wordsworth speaks thus severely of an attack made upon his son-in-law, Edward Quillinan, by Landor: "I should have disapproved of his [Quillinan's] condescending to notice anything that a man so deplorably tormented by ungovernable passion as that unhappy creature might eject. His character may be given in two or three words: a madman, a bad man; yet a man of genius, as many a madman is." That criticism seems rather more than righteously severe; but Wordsworth, while he cared little for the criticism of the reviews, felt keenly the lash of the violent Landor. The violent Landor we must call him, for violence was the too dominant trait of his noble genius; and he exasperated Wordsworth, as we see. But compare what I have just quoted with his familiar remark about the small critics: "My ears are stone dead to this idle buzz, and my flesh as insensible as iron to these petty stings." That Wordsworth said at thirty-six years of age; and here is a striking reminiscence recorded during his later years, and published in the "Prose Works." At seventy-one he said to Lady Richardson:
It would certainly have been a great object to me to have reaped the profits I should have done from my writings but for the stupidity of Mr. Gifford and the impertinence of Mr. Jeffrey. It would have enabled me to purchase many books which I could not obtain, and I should have gone to Italy earlier, which I never could afford to do until I was sixty-five, when Moxon gave me a thousand pounds for my writings. This was the only kind of injury Mr. Jeffrey did me, for I immediately perceived that his mind was of that kind that his individual opinion on poetry was of no consequence to me whatever; that it was only by the influence his periodical exercised at the time in preventing my poems being read and sold that he could injure me.... I never, therefore, felt his opinion of the slightest value except in preventing the young of that generation from receiving impressions which might have been of use to them through life.
This is grand self-confidence; and it is in the same tone that elsewhere he says:
Feeling that my writings were founded on what was true and spiritual in human nature, I knew the time would come when they must be known.
In this connexion the English reviews of that time are still interesting reading, particularly the "Quarterly" and the "Edinburgh." What was Jeffrey saying in his "organ" during the years of Wordsworth's earlier fame? In 1807 he described the poem of "The Beggars" as "a very paragon of silliness and affectation"; and he said of "Alice Fell," "If the printing of such verses be not felt as an insult on the public taste, we are afraid it cannot be insulted." Two years later he calls upon the patrons of the Lake school of poetry to "think with what infinite contempt the powerful mind of Burns would have perused the story of Alice Fell and her duffle cloak, of Andrew Jones and the half-crown, or of little Dan without breeches and his thievish grandfather." Wordsworth dropped the poem of "Andrew Jones," and never restored it—an omission almost unique, as we shall see; for he stood by the substance of his work, if not always by the form, with great pertinacity. He said of "Alice Fell," in his old age, "It brought upon me a world of ridicule by the small critics, so that in policy I excluded it from many editions of my poems, till it was restored at the request of some of my friends." Wordsworth had no stancher friend, his poetry had no more delicate critic, than Charles Lamb; and Lamb wrote thus in 1815 to Wordsworth about "Alice Fell" and the assailants of the poem. He said: "I am glad that you have not sacrificed a verse to those scoundrels. I would not have had you offer up the poorest rag that lingered upon the stript shoulders of little Alice Fell, to have atoned all their malice: I would not have given 'em a red cloak to save their souls."
Jeffrey decried two other pieces that rank among the most perfect of Wordsworth's minor poems, as "stuff about dancing daffodils and sister Emmelines," and spoke of another, which we count for pure poetry to-day, as "a rapturous, mystical ode to the cuckoo, in which the author, striving after force and originality, produces nothing but absurdity." And he attacked these lines in the "Ode to Duty":
Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong: And the most ancient heavens through thee are fresh and strong.
This, Jeffrey said, is "utterly without meaning: at least we have no sort of conception in what sense Duty can be said to keep the old skies fresh, and the stars from wrong." We need not be surprised at Jeffrey's failing to admire these lines: they are transcendentalism, and it would have troubled Wordsworth himself to render them into the plain speech which he recommended as the proper diction of poetry. For they have not a definite translatable content of thought; and we cannot read them as philosophy or ethics; but as poetry we may feel their power; we are willing to enjoy them for their own sake, because beauty is enough. But this Jeffrey did not admit; Jeffrey was not vulnerable by magnificent phrases, and of course he could not foresee what a power Wordsworth's transcendentalism was to exert. When the ode "Intimations of Immortality" first appeared (with the edition of 1807), Jeffrey called it "the most illegible and unintelligible part of the publication."[F] The remark need not surprise us. Jeffrey looked for logical thought in the poem, and logical thought it had not; whatever else it may contain, it will hardly be said to propound any new arguments for immortality. But Jeffrey wrote in all sincerity, and later in his life he read Wordsworth's poetry a second time, with a view to discover, if he could, the merits which he had failed to see when he criticised it—the merits which the English public had then found out. His effort was a failure: for him the primrose remained a primrose to the last, and nothing more. The acute lawyer was not a poet, nor a judge of poets; he had an erroneous notion of what the office of poetry is; of what it has been and will be—to please, to elevate, to suggest, but not to argue or convince; and to the last he did not get beyond his early decision, which, in the article just quoted from, runs as follows:
We think there is every reason to hope that the lamentable consequences which have resulted from Mr. Wordsworth's open violation of the established laws of poetry, will operate as a wholesome warning to those who might otherwise have been seduced by his example, and be the means of restoring to that ancient and venerable code its honor and authority.
But the critic cannot always tell what the new "song is destined to, and what the stars intend to do." It is now evident enough where the early assailants of Wordsworth were mistaken; and yet which critic of to-day would be sure of his ground in a similar case? For the faults of genius are old, familiar, and easily to be discerned; while, on the other hand, genius itself is always novel, and therefore may be easily mistaken. It takes genius to recognize genius; and most of Wordsworth's critics were not men of genius. Landor, who was one, made a wise remark upon this point. He said, "To compositions of a new kind, like Wordsworth's, we come without scales and weights, and without the means of making an assay."
But by pointing out his faults, his critics did him and us a service; and it was one by which the poet profited, as we have seen, in spite of his independence.
Let us now look at some of Wordsworth's multiple readings, if we may call them so—passages, namely, in which he has returned, year after year, to certain peccant verses, changing them again and again in the quest of adequate expression. After repeated experiments he sometimes finds a reading to please himself; sometimes, having allowed a provisional text to stand throughout many years, he discards it and returns to the original form; and sometimes, again, he abandons a passage entirely, after scarring it with a lifetime's emendations. Of the first sort I will cite three readings of a stanza in "A Poet's Epitaph." As first published in the "Lyrical Ballads" of 1800, the poem contained this adjuration to the philosopher "wrapped in his sensual fleece"
O turn aside, and take, I pray, That he below may rest in peace, Thy pin-point of a soul away!
Lamb did not like this; and he wrote to Wordsworth: "The 'Poet's Epitaph' is disfigured, to my taste, by the coarse epithet of 'pin-point' in the sixth stanza." In the edition of 1815 the "coarse epithet" disappears, and the passage is modified as follows:
——Take, I pray, That he below may rest in peace, That abject thing, thy soul, away!
The years that "bring the philosophic mind" did not, however, reconcile Wordsworth with the particular "philosopher" here in question. (Sir Humphrey Davy, as Crabb Robinson, if I am not mistaken, tells us). On the contrary, the poet devised a still more injurious epithet for that unhappy physicist; and the passage now reads:
——Take, I pray,... Thy ever-dwindling soul away!
Another of these multiple corrections has attracted much notice; it occurs in the successive descriptions of the craft wherein the "Blind Highland Boy" went sailing. In the first edition of that poem Wordsworth called it
A Household Tub, like one of those Which women use to wash their clothes!
It would seem difficult to defend this couplet upon any accepted theory of aesthetics, rhyme, or syntax; and the "Household Tub" provoked quite naturally a shout of derision from all the critics; it became the poetical scandal of the day. Jeffery, mindful of "the established laws" of poetic art, protested that there was nothing, down to the wiping of shoes, or the evisceration of chickens, which may not be introduced in poetry, if this is tolerated. The tub, in short, proved intolerable to the reviewers; and when next the poem appeared in a new edition, that of 1815, Wordsworth transmuted the craft into a green turtle shell, noting the change as made "upon the suggestion of a Friend ":
The shell of a green Turtle, thin And hollow: you might sit therein, It was so wide and deep. 'Twas even the largest of its kind, Large, thin, and light as birch tree rind; So light a shell that it would swim, And gaily lift its fearless brim Above the tossing waves.
Lamb's comment upon this change was as follows:
I am afraid lest that substitution of a shell (a flat falsification of the history) for the household implement, as it stood at first, was a kind of tub thrown out to the beast, or rather thrown out for him. The tub was a good honest tub in its place, and nothing could be fairly said against it. You say you made the alteration for the "friendly reader," but the "malicious" will take it to himself. Damn 'em, if you give 'em an inch, etc.
Wordsworth, however, instead of restoring the old text, went on amending, and with reason; the reading just given is diffuse. But see now the third and final form which he gave to the passage. The sublimation of the Household Tub is now completed; it becomes, at last,
A shell of ample size, and light As the pearly car of Amphitrite, That sportive dolphins draw. And as a Coracle that braves On Vaga's breast the fretful waves, This shell upon the deep would swim.
Here again are some new readings that Wordsworth discarded after long trial. A well-known sonnet, one of his earliest, began thus in 1807:
I grieved for Buonaparte, with a vain And an unthinking grief! The vital blood Of that Man's mind, what can it be? What food Fed his first hopes? What knowledge could he gain?
In 1815 we find the passage rewritten as follows:
I grieved for Buonaparte, with a vain And an unthinking grief! for, who aspires To genuine greatness but from just desires, And knowledge such as He could never gain?
But in the later editions the first reading was restored, except the words "vital blood," and we now read:
The tenderest mood Of that man's mind, what can it be?
In "The Nightingale" Wordsworth first called that bird "a creature of a fiery heart"; but in the edition of 1815 it became "a creature of ebullient heart," a flat disenchantment of the verse. The change was questioned from the first, as Crabb Robinson tells us, and in later editions the first reading was restored. A fortunate correction made in the same edition was retained—the change of "laughing company" to "jocund company," in "The Daffodils":
A poet could not but be gay In such a jocund company.
—1815.
The poem "Rural Architecture," in the "Lyrical Ballads" of 1800, was curtailed of its closing stanza in the edition of 1815:
Some little I've seen of blind boisterous works In Paris and London, 'mong Christians and Turks, Spirits busy to do and undo, etc., etc.
But in Lamb's correspondence of the same year he complains to Wordsworth that the omission "leaves it [the poem] in my mind less complete," and the lines were restored in the later editions. Not to differ hastily with Lamb, the lines yet seem lines to be spared. In the same sentence he complains that in the new edition there is another "admirable line gone (or something come instead of it), 'the stone-chat, and the glancing sandpiper,' which was a line quite alive. I demand these at your hand." Wordsworth restored the line, and the three versions of the passage are worth comparison. It is from the "Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew Tree," and describes a wanderer in the solitude of the country:
His only visitants a straggling sheep, The stone-chat, or the glancing sand-piper: And on these barren rocks, with juniper, And heath, and thistle, thinly sprinkled o'er, Fixing his downcast eye, he many an hour A morbid pleasure nourished.
—"Lyrical Ballads."
In the second reading he corrects a bad assonance thus:
His only visitants a straggling sheep, The stone-chat, or the sand-lark, restless bird, Piping along the margin of the lake....
—1815.
Here the "line quite alive" is gone—to be restored in deference, apparently, to Lamb's request. Another assonance is got rid of in the later editions, the "thistle thinly sprinkled o'er," and the passage now reads melodiously as follows:
His only visitants a straggling sheep. The stone-chat, or the glancing sand-piper: And on these barren rocks, with fern and heath, And juniper and thistle, sprinkled o'er, Fixing his downcast eye, he many an hour A morbid pleasure nourished.
Wordsworth struck out many lines and stanzas in the course of his revisions, besides main passages of considerable length, as from the "Thanksgiving Ode" and the patriotic ode of January, 1816. These omissions are too long to quote here; but the following lines dropped from the ode on "Immortality" will have interest; they are not to be found, I think, in any English edition since that of 1815. Addressing the child over whom Immortality, in the language of the ode,
Broods like the Day, a Master o'er a Slave, A Presence which is not to be put by—
this earlier reading continues:
To whom the grave Is but a lonely bed without the sense or sight Of day or the warm light: A place of thought where we in waiting lie.
Another notable omitted passage is the introduction to "Dion," published in 1816:
Fair is the Swan, whose majesty, prevailing O'er breezeless water on Locarno's lake....
Here nineteen lines full of beauty are sacrificed by Wordsworth in the interest of the unity of the poem. He struck out, too, some lines from "The Daisy," "The Thorn," and "Simon Lee," and eight stanzas have disappeared from "Peter Bell" since the first edition of that poem. Among them are these grotesque lines, favorites with Charles Lamb:
Is it a party in a parlour? Cramm'd just as they on earth were cramm'd— Some sipping punch, some sipping tea, All silent and all damn'd!
And here are some verses that have interest from the glimpse they give of Wordsworth's faculty in a field that he declined to cultivate—the amatory or "fleshly," as it has been conveniently named for us of late. I quote from that rare book, the "Descriptive Sketches" of 1793; and as the lines are not included in any edition of his poems, they are unfamiliar to most readers. But two copies of this book, so far as I know, exist in this country. One of them, which belonged to the late Prof. Henry Reed, Wordsworth's American editor, is full of corrections in Wordsworth's own handwriting; and it is by the courtesy of its present owner that I am enabled to give here the early text with these corrections, never before printed. The young Wordsworth takes leave of Switzerland, at the conclusion of his pedestrian tour, with this glowing apostrophe:
ye the Farewell! those forms that in thy noontide shade your Rest near their little plots of oaten glade, Dark Those stedfast eyes, that beating breasts inspire, To throw the "sultry rays" of young Desire; soft Those lips whose ^ tides of fragrance come and go Accordant to the cheek's unquiet glow; Ye warm Those shadowy breasts In love's soft light array'd And rising by the moon of passion sway'd."[G]
Wordsworth thus dropped, for one reason or another, many passages from his poems. But did he abandon entire poems? That did not often happen. He strove patiently to perfect the form of his thought; but he was unwilling to let the substance of it go. In the seven volumes of his poetry, as they now stand, but two poems are lacking, to the best of my knowledge, of all that he ever published. One of these, an unimportant piece beginning, "The confidence of youth our only art," was printed with the "Memorials of a Tour on the Continent" (1822), and no longer appears in the collected editions. The other missing poem, "Andrew Jones," was abandoned for reasons, as I think, of considerable critical interest. In the "Lyrical Ballads" it began thus:
I hate that Andrew Jones: he'll breed His children up to waste and pillage: I wish the press-gang or the drum With its tantara sound would come, And sweep him from the village!
This poem may be found (with, slight emendations) as late as the edition of 1815; but after that date I meet with it nowhere but in foreign reprints. Why was it dropped? It is doubtless a story of unrelieved though petty suffering; it corresponds, in small, to what Mr. Matthew Arnold calls the "poetically faulty" situation of Empedocles, a situation "in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done." But, on the other hand, that fragment of Æschylus, the "Prometheus Bound," in which everything is endured and nothing done, yet remains a work of the deepest interest: nor need we think that Wordsworth abandoned his little poem for a reason so refined as that which led Mr. Arnold to abandon one of his own. There was, as I take it, a moral reason which led to Wordsworth's decision; namely, that the story of "Andrew Jones" is told with bitterness of feeling from beginning to end; and against bitterness of feeling Wordsworth had recorded, during his earlier years, a striking protest. We shall read it presently; but first let us couple with the poem a sentence from his prose—a sentence full of the same feeling, and which was early dropped for the same reason. We shall find it in the edition of 1815, in the essay supplementary to the famous Preface of that date. There Wordsworth turns upon his critics as follows:
"By what fatality the orb of my genius (for genius none of them seem to deny me) acts upon these men like the moon upon a certain description of patients, it would be irksome to enquire: nor would it consist with the respect which I owe myself to take further notice of opponents whom I internally despise."
This is not quite in the vein of the serenely meditative poet; and if we look back to a time twenty years earlier than this, we shall find that Wordsworth had reproved his heat beforehand. In 1795, when he first chose definitely the poet's career, he had written these lines:
If thou be one whose heart the holy forms Of young imagination have kept pure, Stranger! henceforth be warned; and know that pride, Howe'er disguised in its own majesty, Is littleness: that he who feels contempt For any living thing, hath faculties Which he has never used: that thought with him Is in its infancy.
That is the teaching of earlier and serener years, of the time when the poet was still quietly embayed in youth, when jealous criticism, and envy, and disappointment were still trials of the future. Youth has its own passions; but it has also its peculiar serenity; and after Wordsworth had passed through the stormy years which gave him fame, we see the maturer man recalling the teaching of his calmer self. It was in obedience to this, as I believe, that he cancelled the passages that have just been mentioned; feeling their discord with the pure song of that early time.
Let us now look at some of the passages which Wordsworth has emended, not by taking away from the words of his book, but by adding to them. As he wrote to Mr. Dyce, he diligently revised the "Excursion," in the edition of 1827, and got the sense "in several instances, ... into less room"; and minor changes are to be counted by hundreds. But he made some additions to this poem, and for significant reasons.
Readers of Christopher North's essay, in the "Recreations," on "Sacred Poetry," will remember the long indictment which he there brings against the earlier poems of Wordsworth; he complains of them as being irreligious. It is interesting to find the earthly Christopher displaying the pious zeal of an inquisitor in the matter, declaring that in all of Wordsworth's writings, up to the "Excursion," "though we have much fine poetry, and some high philosophy, it would puzzle the most ingenious to detect much, if any, Christian religion"; and lamenting its absence even in the "Excursion," in the story of "Margaret," as told in the first book. This tale Christopher North calls "perhaps the most elaborate picture he [Wordsworth] ever painted of any conflict within any one human heart;" but he adds, with how much sincerity we will not now ask, that it "is, with all its pathos, repulsive to every religious mind—that being wanting without which the entire representation is vitiated.... This utter absence of Revealed Religion ... throws over the whole poem to which the tale of Margaret belongs an unhappy suspicion of hollowness and insincerity in that poetical religion which at the best is a sorry substitute indeed for the light that is from heaven."
That Wordsworth laid to heart this criticism, will appear on comparing the original passage, as reprobated by Christopher North, with the form which the poet gave it in the latter editions. Originally the peddler, finishing the story of "Margaret," moralizes thus:
My Friend! enough to sorrow you have given; The purposes of wisdom ask no more: Be wise and cheerful, and no longer read The forms of things with an unworthy eye; She sleeps in the calm earth, and peace is here. I well remember that those very plumes, Those weeds, and the high spear-grass on that wall, By mist and silent raindrops silvered o'er, As once I passed, into my heart convey'd So still an image of tranquillity, So calm and still, and look'd so beautiful Amid the uneasy thoughts which fill'd my mind, That what we feel of sorrow and despair From ruin and from change, and all the griefs The passing shows of Being leave behind, Appear'd an idle dream, that could not live Where meditation was. I turn'd away, And walk'd along my road in happiness.
"What meditation?" cries out Christopher North. "Turn thou, O child of a day, to the New Testament, and therein thou mayest find comfort." And Wordsworth in his revision made the following additions to this fine pagan passage:
——Enough to sorrow you have given; The purposes of wisdom ask no more: Nor more would she have craved as due to one Who in her worst distress, had often felt The unbounded might of prayer; and learned, with soul Fixed on the cross, that consolation springs From sources deeper far than deepest pain For the meek sufferer. Why then should we read The forms of things with an unworthy eye? She sleeps in the calm earth, and peace is here.
Then follow the beautiful lines about the weeds, the spear-grass, the mist and rain-drops, as quoted above; but the close of the passage is extended as follows:
——All the griefs That passing shows of Being leave behind, Appeared an idle dream, that could maintain Nowhere dominion o'er the enlightened spirit Whose meditative sympathies repose Upon the breast of Faith. I turned away, And walked along my road in happiness.
It remains to be said that a certain number of Wordsworth's poems—and these were, as we might expect, among his best—have stood unchanged in all the editions from the first, running the gauntlet of their author's critical moods for half a century, and coming out untouched at last. I will not call them uncorrected poems, but rather poems in which all the needed corrections were made before their first publication, for they belong to that exquisite class of creations—too small a class, even in the works of the greatest masters—in which the poet has fused completely the refractory element of language before pouring it out into the mould of poetic form. Among these untouched poems are three from the "Lyrical Ballads"—"A slumber did my spirit seal," "Three years she grew in sun and shower," and "She dwelt among the untrodden ways"—all written at the age of twenty-nine; such are the "Yew Tree," written four years later, and "She was a phantom of delight." Several of the best sonnets, too, were unchanged; as that on "Westminster Bridge," and "Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour."
And lastly, I may mention one or two changes of text which Wordsworth did not make, but which belong to the class for which careless editors or proofreaders are responsible. An edition well known to the American public is especially peccant in this respect; that beautiful line, for instance, in "The Pet Lamb"—
And that green corn all day is rustling in thy ears,
becomes,
That green cord all day is rustling in thy ears.
And here is a really interesting erratum; it occurs in the poem of "The Idiot Boy," where it has stood unnoticed for twenty years and more. Wordsworth's stanzas, describing the boy's night-long ride under the moon, "from eight o'clock till five," hearing meanwhile "the owls in tuneful concert strive," originally put these words into his mouth, the actual words of his hero, as Wordsworth tells us in a note:
The cocks did crow to-whoo, to-whoo, And the Sun did shine so cold, Thus answered Johnny in his glory.
But this reading puzzled the proofreader. How could the sun shine at night? This being clearly impossible, he restored the idiot boy to partial sanity. He made him say:
The cocks did crow to-whoo, to-whoo, And the Moon did shine so cold;
and the only wonder is that he did not also read,
The cocks did crow cock-a-doodle-doo.
Some one proposes, I believe, a similar emendation in "As You Like It," intending to make the Duke speak better sense than Shakespeare put into his mouth. He is to say,
Sermons in books. Stones in the running brooks, and good in everything.
But while in the main the text of Shakespeare is bettering under criticism, Wordsworth is suffering miscorrection; and for the good that he has to give us we cannot quite dispense with the original editions.
Titus Munson Coan.
[B] After the early poems just mentioned and the "Lyrical Ballads," 1798 to 1802, the chief editions to be consulted for the changes of text are the complete editions of 1807, 1815, and 1836, and the original issues of "The Excursion" (1814), of "The White Doe of Rylston" (1815), of "Peter Bell," and of "The Waggoner" (1819). Unfortunately I have not been able to get access to Mr. W. Johnston's useful collection of Wordsworth's "Earlier Poems" (London, 1857): it would have lightened the task of collecting the variantes, the more important of which, for the period covered by the collection, are given in it. But, having gone in nearly every case to the original texts, I need hardly say that I have been careful to quote them accurately in the present article.
[ [C]"Prose Works," III., 302.
[D]"The Dial," Vol. III., p. 514.
[ [E]"Prose Works," III., 381.
[ [F]"Edinburgh Review," October, 1807.
[ [G]I venture to note, in passing, a small class of corrections in which the poet has cleared his text from certain innocencies of expression that were liable to be misread by persons on the alert for double meanings. The following are among the Wordsworthian simplicities that have been amended in the later editions; the reference is made to the octavos of 1815, which may be compared with any of the editions since 1836:
Vol. I., page 111, "The Brothers," passage beginning, "James, tired perhaps."
Vol. I., page 210, "Michael," passage beginning, "Old Michael, while he was a babe in arms."
Vol. I., page 223, "Laodamia," stanza beginning, "Be taught, O faithful Consort."