On books and arts

by Sir Frederick Wedmore

If the contributions themselves were characteristic, so certainly is the manner of speaking of them. These men, and the men who were more or less their associates, believed much in each other. In no different spirit from Wordsworth’s did Coleridge himself write, in his introduction to Poems on Various Subjects, these words about Charles Lamb: ‘The effusions signed C. L. were written by Mr. Charles Lamb, of the India House; independently of the signature, their superior merit would have sufficiently distinguished them.’ And in no different spirit did Coleridge write of Wordsworth, years afterwards, in the Biographia Literaria, when their ways had parted. He could explain generously then ‘what Mr. Wordsworth really intended’ by the theories put forward in that famous preface which was too much for Coleridge.

But to return to the book—or rather, for the moment, to Wordsworth’s account of it. As the friends endeavoured to proceed conjointly in the construction of the ‘Ancient Mariner’—it was still that same evening in which the poem was conceived—their respective manners proved so widely different that it would have been, to Wordsworth’s mind, ‘quite presumptuous in me to do anything but separate from an undertaking upon which I could only have been a clog.’ ‘The “Ancient Mariner” grew and grew,’ he adds, ‘till it became too important for our first object, which was limited to our expectation of five pounds; and we began to think of a volume, which was to consist, as Mr. Coleridge has told the world, of poems chiefly on supernatural subjects taken from common life, but looked at, as much as might be, through an imaginative medium.’ That ‘imaginative medium’ was to distinguish these poems, we have been told elsewhere, from the rhymed stories of Crabbe. Poetic realism and prosaic realism, and what a world between them!

In April 1798 Wordsworth wrote to his friend, the Bristol bookseller: ‘You will be pleased to hear that I have gone on adding very rapidly to my stock of poetry. Do come and let me read it to you under the old trees in the park.’ Definite proposals, too, were to be made; and it was written to Cottle—this time, I think, by Coleridge—‘We deem that the volumes offered to you are, to a certain degree, one work in kind.’ That same spring, but later on, Cottle did visit Nether Stowey, and he writes of it in his own book of interesting if sometimes illegitimate gossip: ‘At this interview it was determined that the volume should be published under the title of Lyrical Ballads, on the terms stipulated.’ Thirty guineas seems to have been Wordsworth’s share. And, furthermore, it was settled that it should not contain the poem of ‘Salisbury Plain,’ but only an extract from it—Cottle himself, nevertheless, thought that poem the finest Wordsworth had written; that it should not contain the poem of ‘Peter Bell,’ but consist rather of shorter poems, and for the most part of pieces more recently written. ‘I had recommended two volumes,’ Cottle tells us, ‘but one was fixed on, and that to be published anonymously.’ All which speedily came about. Cottle further says, ‘The volume of the Lyrical Ballads was published about midsummer, 1798.’ But it was not really till some while after midsummer, for not only were the Tintern Abbey lines, which close the little volume with so august a calm, not written till the 13th of July, but it is said expressly in Wordsworth’s Life that as late as September the 13th the book was ‘printed, not published.’ Some weeks before, Wordsworth and his sister took up temporary abode in Bristol, that they might be near the printer. Then, at length, in the early part of autumn, the Lyrical Ballads appeared, and Wordsworth and his sister, and Coleridge, left England for Germany.

To the first edition of Lyrical Ballads is prefixed four pages of ‘Advertisement,’ or preface. About it two or three points are noticeable. First, it gives no hint that two poets have been engaged upon the volume: ‘the author,’ who speaks of himself in the third person, is responsible alike for the ‘Ancient Mariner’ and for ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill.’ Secondly, it is written in that familiar language—just our daily speech a little chastened and braced—which Wordsworth employed at the beginning, and employed to the end. Again, it utters, thus early in Wordsworth’s life, that note of warning as to mistaken notions of what Poetry demands, which the writer repeated afterwards with infinite elaboration. ‘It is the honourable characteristic of Poetry that its materials are to be found in every subject which can interest the human mind’—that is, by implication, his first apology for the choice of humble theme. ‘Readers of superior judgment may disapprove of the style in which many of these pieces are executed: it must be expected that many lines and phrases will not exactly suit their taste.’ Expressions may seem too familiar—may seem lacking in dignity. But, ‘it is apprehended that the more conversant the reader is with our elder writers, and with those in modern times who have been most successful in painting manners and passions, the fewer complaints of this kind will he have to make.’ Here is the apology for the fashion of presentation—the germ of that which was afterwards so fully developed in famous writings which borrowed here and there a neat and significant phrase from this first ‘Advertisement.’

The title of the ‘Ancient Mariner’ begins the table of contents, and the poem runs on to the fifty-first page of the volume—nearly a quarter of all that the volume holds. But Coleridge’s remaining contributions were small and few, consisting of ‘The Nightingale,’ and of but one other. That he made even these contributions has sometimes escaped people’s notice. He had intended to do more, for he tells us in the Biographia Literaria that, having written the ‘Ancient Mariner,’ he was preparing, among other poems, ‘The Dark Ladie’ and the ‘Christabel.’ ‘But Mr. Wordsworth’s industry has proved much more successful, and the number of his poems so much greater, that my compositions, instead of forming a balance, appeared rather an interpolation of heterogeneous matter.’ When the ‘Ancient Mariner’ came to be reprinted—under Coleridge’s banner alone—some minor changes were made. Some of them were gains, but some were losses. And there was added then, what the Lyrical Ballads does not contain, the ‘Gloss’—that wonderful telling of the story and yet departing from it—which is set forth in grave and inspired prose. ‘It was an afterthought,’ Wordsworth tells us, in speaking of his friend’s poem.

Of Wordsworth’s own share—that far greater share of his—in the poems, it is interesting to notice how the general title, Lyrical Ballads with a few other Poems, is required to cover the whole of it. For they are of two kinds—Wordsworth’s poems in the volume—the simple stories of humble life, which may or may not be dramatic, in which the ‘I’ of the poet is not necessarily himself, and the poems which record unmistakably his personal feeling and experience, such as ‘The Tables Turned, an Evening Scene,’ the noble lines written near Tintern Abbey, and the small poem which rejoices in perhaps the longest title ever bestowed upon verse, ‘Lines written at a small distance from my house, and sent by my little boy to the person to whom they are addressed.’ These, and one or two others, are the contributions to which Coleridge refers when he says that ‘Mr. Wordsworth added two or three poems written in his own character, in the impassioned, lofty, and sustained diction which is characteristic of his genius.’

Many of Wordsworth’s verses, whether of the one class or the other, in the Lyrical Ballads, bear reference to the circumstances of the moment and the place—are stamped with the mark of his Alfoxden sojourn. ‘The Thorn’ arose out of his observing on the ridge of Quantock Hill a thorn on a stormy day. He had often passed it unnoticed in calm. ‘I said to myself, Cannot I by some invention do as much to make this Thorn prominently an impressive object as the storm has made it to my eyes at this moment? I began the poem accordingly, and composed it with great rapidity.’ He adds that Sir George Beaumont painted a picture from it, which Wilkie thought his best. Wilkie—sagacious Scotsman!—did not commit himself too much by such praise. But Wordsworth thought the picture nobly done. The only fault of any consequence, he said, was the woman’s figure—too old and decrepit ‘for one likely to frequent an eminence on such a call.’ ‘Expostulation and Reply,’ which Wordsworth learned was a favourite among the Quakers, was composed in front of the house at Alfoxden, in the spring of 1798. ‘The Tables Turned’ was composed at the same time, in praise of the

Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,

Truth breathed by cheerfulness.

And of ‘The Last of the Flock,’ the author says that the incident occurred in the village of Holford, close by Alfoxden.