Gossip in a Library Part 9

I have said that this book is one of the latest expressions of unadulterated eighteenth-century sentiment. For form's sake, the Diarist mentions now and again, very superficially, Shakespeare, Bacon, and Milton; but in reality, the garden of his study is bounded by a thick hedge behind the statue of Dryden. The cla.s.sics of Greece and Rome, and the limpid reasonable writers of England from the Restoration downwards, these are enough for him. Writing in 1800 he has no suspicion of a new age preparing. We read these stately pages, and we rub our eyes. Can it be that when all this was written, Wordsworth and Coleridge had issued _Lyrical Ballads_, and Keats himself was in the world? Almost the only touch which shows consciousness of a suspicion that romantic literature existed, is a reference to the rival translations of Burger's _Lenore_ in 1797. Sir Walter Scott, as we know, was one of the anonymous translators; it was, however, in all probability not his, but Taylor's, that Green mentions with special approbation.

In one hundred years a mighty change has come over the tastes and fashions of literary life. When _The Diary of a Lover of Literature_ was written, Dr. Hurd, the pompous and dictatorial Bishop of Worcester, was a dreaded martinet of letters, carrying on the tradition of his yet more formidable master Warburton. As people nowadays discuss Verlaine and Ibsen, so they argued in those days about G.o.dwin and Horne Tooke, and shuddered over each fresh incarnation of Mrs. Radcliffe. Soame Jenyns was dead, indeed, in the flesh, but his influence stalked at nights under the lamps and where disputants were gathered together in country rectories. Dr. Parr affected the Olympian nod, and crowned or checkmated reputations. "A flattering message from Dr. P----" sends our Diarist into ecstasies so excessive that a reaction sets in, and the "predominant and final effect upon my mind has been depression rather than elevation." We think of

_The yarns Jack Hall invented, and the songs Jem Roper sung.

And where are now Jem Roper and Jack Hall?_

Who cares now for Parr's praise or Soame Jenyns' censure? Yet in our Diarist's pages these take equal rank with names that time has spared, with Robertson and Gibbon, Burke and Reynolds.

Thomas Green was more ready for experiment in art than in literature.

He was "particularly struck" at the Royal Academy of 1797 with a sea view by a painter called Turner:

"Fishing vessels coming in with a heavy swell in apprehension of a tempest, gathering in the distance, and casting as it advances a night of shade, while a parting glow is spread with fine effect upon the sh.o.r.e; the whole composition bold in design and masterly in execution.

I am entirely unacquainted with the artist, but if he proceeds as he has begun, he cannot fail to become the first in his department."

A remarkable prophecy, and one of the earliest notices we possess of the effect which the youthful Turner, then but twenty-two years of age, made on his contemporaries.

As a rule, except when he is travelling, our Diarist almost entirely occupies himself with a discussion of the books he happens to be reading. His opinions are not always in concert with the current judgment of to-day; he admires Warburton much more than we do, and Fielding much less. But he never fails to be amusing, because so independent within the restricted bounds of his intellectual domain.

He is shut up in his eighteenth century like a prisoner, but inside its wall his liberty of action is complete. Sometimes his judgments are sensibly in advance of his age. It was the fashion in 1798 to denounce the Letters of Lord Chesterfield as frivolous and immoral.

Green takes a wider view, and in a thoughtful a.n.a.lysis points out their judicious merits and their genuine parental a.s.siduity. When Green can for a moment lift his eyes from his books, he shows a sensitive quality of observation which might have been cultivated to general advantage. Here is a reflection which seems to be as novel as it is happy:

"Looked afterwards into the Roman Catholic Chapel in Duke Street. The thrilling tinkle of the little bell at the elevation of the Host is perhaps the finest example that can be given of the sublime by a.s.sociation--nothing so poor and trivial in itself, nothing so transcendently awful, as indicating the sudden change in the consecrated Elements, and the instant presence of the Redeemer."

Much of the latter part of the _Diary_, as we hold it, is occupied with the description of a tour in England and Wales. Here Green is lucid, graceful, and refined: producing one after another little vignettes in prose, which remind us of the simple drawings of the water-colour masters of the age, of Girtin or Cozens or Glover. The volume, which opened with some remarks on Sir William Temple, closes with a disquisition on Warton's criticism of the poets. The curtain rises for three years on a smooth stream of intellectual reflection, unruffled by outward incident, and then falls again before we are weary of the monotonous flow of undiluted criticism. _The Diary of a Lover of Literature_ is at once the pleasing record of a cultivated mind, and a monument to a species of existence that is as obsolete as nankeen breeches or a tie-wig.

Isaac D'Israeli said that Green had humbled all modern authors to the dust, and that he earnestly wished for a dozen volumes of _The Diary_.

At Green's death material for at least so many supplements were placed in the hands of John Mitford, who did not venture to produce them.

From January 1834 to May 1843, however, Mitford was incessantly contributing to _The Gentleman's Magazine_ unpublished extracts from this larger _Diary_. These have never been collected, but my friend, Mr. W. Aldis Wright, possesses a very interesting volume, into which the whole ma.s.s of them has been carefully and consecutively pasted, with copious ill.u.s.trative matter, by the hand of Edward FitzGerald, whose interest in and curiosity about Thomas Green were unflagging.

PETER BELL AND HIS TORMENTORS

PETER BELL: _A Tale in Verse, by William Wordsworth. London: Printed by Strahan and Spottiswoode, Printers-Street: for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, Paternoster Row_. 1819.

None of Wordsworth's productions are better known by name than _Peter Bell_, and yet few, probably, are less familiar, even to convinced Wordsworthians. The poet's biographers and critics have commonly shirked the responsibility of discussing this poem, and when the Primrose stanza has been quoted, and the Parlour stanza smiled at, there is usually no more said about _Peter Bell_. A puzzling obscurity hangs around its history. We have no positive knowledge why its publication was so long delayed; nor, having been delayed, why it was at length determined upon. Yet a knowledge of this poem is not merely an important, but, to a thoughtful critic, an essential element in the comprehension of Wordsworth's poetry. No one who examines that body of literature with sympathetic attention should be content to overlook the piece in which Wordsworth's theories are pushed to their furthest extremity.

When _Peter Bell_ was published in April 1819, the author remarked that it had "nearly survived its _minority_; for it saw the light in the summer of 1798." It was therefore composed at Alfoxden, that plain stone house in West Somersetshire, which Dorothy and William Wordsworth rented for the sum of 23 for one year, the rent covering the use of "a large park, with seventy head of deer."

Thanks partly to its remoteness from a railway, and partly also to the peculiarities of its family history, Alfoxden remains singularly unaltered. The lover of Wordsworth who follows its deep umbrageous drive to the point where the house, the park around it, and the Quantocks above them suddenly break upon the view, sees to-day very much what Wordsworth's visitors saw when they trudged up from Stowey to commune with him in 1797. The barrier of ancient beech-trees running up into the moor, Kilve twinkling below, the stretch of fields and woods descending northward to the expanse of the yellow Severn Channel, the plain white facade of Alfoxden itself, with its easy right of way across the fantastic garden, the tumultuous pathway down to the glen, the poet's favourite parlour at the end of the house--all this presents an impression which is probably less transformed, remains more absolutely intact, than any other which can be identified with the early or even the middle life of the poet. That William and Dorothy, in their poverty, should have rented so n.o.ble a country property seems at first sight inexplicable, and the contrast between Alfoxden and Coleridge's squalid pot-house in Nether Stowey can never cease to be astonishing. But the sole object of the trustees in admitting Wordsworth to Alfoxden was, as Mrs. Sandford has discovered, "to keep the house inhabited during the minority of the owner;" it was let to the poet on the 14th of July 1797.

It was in this delicious place, under the shadow of "smooth Quantock's airy ridge," that Wordsworth's genius came of age. It was during the twelve months spent here that Wordsworth lost the final traces of the old traditional accent of poetry. It was here that the best of the _Lyrical Ballads_ were written, and from this house the first volume of that epoch-making collection was forwarded to the press. Among the poems written at Alfoxden _Peter Bell_ was prominent, but we hear little of it except from Hazlitt, who, taken over to the Wordsworths by Coleridge from Nether Stowey, was on a first visit permitted to read "the sibylline leaves," and on a second had the rare pleasure of hearing Wordsworth himself chant _Peter Bell_, in his "equable, sustained, and internal" manner of recitation, under the ash-trees of Alfoxden Park. I do not know whether it has been noted that the landscape of _Peter Bell_, although localised in Yorkshire by the banks of the River Swale, is yet pure Somerset in character. The poem was composed, without a doubt, as the poet tramped the gra.s.sy heights of the Quantock Hills, or descended at headlong pace, mouthing and murmuring as he went, into one sylvan combe after another. To give it its proper place among the writings of the school, we must remember that it belongs to the same group as _Tintern Abbey_ and _The Ancient Mariner_.

Why, then, was it not issued to the world with these? Why was it locked up in the poet's desk for twenty-one years, and shown during that time, as we gather from its author's language to Southey, to few, even of his close friends? To these questions we find no reply vouchsafed, but perhaps it is not difficult to discover one. Every revolutionist in literature or art produces some composition in which he goes further than in any other in his defiance of recognised rules and conventions. It was Wordsworth's central theory that no subject can be too simple and no treatment too naked for poetic purposes. His poems written at Alfoxden are precisely those in which he is most audacious in carrying out his principle, and nothing, even of his, is quite so simple or quite so naked as _Peter Bell_.

Hazlitt, a very young man, strongly prejudiced in favour of the new ideas, has given us a notion of the amazement with which he listened to these pieces of Wordsworth, although he was "not critically nor sceptically inclined." Others, we know, were deeply scandalised. I have little doubt that Wordsworth himself considered that, in 1798, his own admirers were scarcely ripe for the publication of _Peter Bell_, while, even so late as June 1812, when Crabb Robinson borrowed the MS. and lent it to Charles Lamb, the latter "found nothing good in it." Robinson seems to have been the one admirer of _Peter Bell_ at that time, and he was irritated at Lamb's indifference. Yet his own opinion became modified when the poem was published, and (May 3, 1819) he calls it "this _unfortunate_ book."[1] In another place (June 12, 1820) Crabb Robinson says that he implored Wordsworth, before the book was printed, to omit "the party in a parlour," and also the banging of the a.s.s's bones, but, of course, in vain.

[Footnote 1: The word _unfortunate_ is omitted by the editor, Thomas Sadler, perhaps in deference to the feelings of Wordsworth's descendants.]

In 1819 much was changed. The poet was now in his fiftieth year. The epoch of his true productiveness was closed; all his best works, except _The Prelude_, were before the public, and although Wordsworth was by no means widely or generally recognised yet as a great poet, there was a considerable audience ready to receive with respect whatever so interesting a person should put forward. Moreover, a new generation had come to the front; Scott's series of verse-romances was closed; Byron was in mid-career; there were young men of extraordinary and somewhat disquieting talent--Sh.e.l.ley, Keats, and Leigh Hunt--all of whom were supposed to be, although characters of a very reprehensible and even alarming cla.s.s, yet distinctly respectful in their att.i.tude towards Mr. Wordsworth. It seemed safe to publish _Peter Bell_.

Accordingly, the thin octavo described at the head of this chapter duly appeared in April 1819. It was so tiny that it had to be eked out with the Sonnets written to W. Westall's Views, and it was adorned by an engraving of Bromley's, after a drawing specially made by Sir George Beaumont to ill.u.s.trate the poem. A letter to Beaumont, unfortunately without a date, in which this frontispiece is discussed, seems to suggest that the engraving was a gift from the artist to the poet; Wordsworth, "in sorrow for the sickly taste of the public in verse," opining that he cannot afford the expense of such a frontispiece as Sir George Beaumont suggests. In accordance with these fears, no doubt, an edition of only 500 was published; but it achieved a success which Wordsworth had neither antic.i.p.ated nor desired. There was a general guffaw of laughter, and all the copies were immediately sold; within a month a ribald public received a third edition, only to discover, with disappointment, that the funniest lines were omitted.

No one admired _Peter Bell_. The inner circle was silent. Baron Field wrote on the t.i.tle-page of his copy, which now belongs to Mr. J. d.y.k.es Campbell, "And his carca.s.s was cast in the way, and the a.s.s stood by it." Sir Walter Scott openly lamented that Wordsworth should exhibit himself "crawling on all fours, when G.o.d has given him so n.o.ble a countenance to lift to heaven." Byron mocked aloud, and, worse than all, the young men from whom so much had been expected, _les jeunes feroces_, leaped on the poor uncomplaining a.s.s like so many hunting-leopards. The air was darkened by hurtling parodies, the arrangement of which is still a standing _crux_ to the bibliographers.

It was Keats's friend, John Hamilton Reynolds, who opened the attack.

His parody _(Peter Bell: a Lyrical Ballad_. London, Taylor and Hessey, 1819) was positively in the field before the original. It was said, at the time, that Wordsworth, feverishly awaiting a specimen copy of his own _Peter Bell_ from town, seized a packet which the mail brought him, only to find that it was the spurious poem which had antic.i.p.ated Simon Pure. _The Times_ protested that the two poems must be from the same pen. Reynolds had probably glanced at proofs of the genuine poem; his preface is a close imitation of Wordsworth's introduction, and the stanzaic form in which the two pieces are written is identical. On the other hand, the main parody is made up of allusions to previous poems by Wordsworth, and shows no acquaintance with the story of _Peter Bell_. Reynolds's whole pamphlet--preface, text, and notes--is excessively clever, and touches up the bard at a score of tender points. It catches the sententious tone of Wordsworth deliciously, and it closes with this charming stanza:

_He quits that moonlight yard of skulls, And still he feels right glad, and smiles With moral joy at that old tomb; Peter's cheek recalls its bloom, And as he creepeth by the tiles, He mutters ever--"W.W.

Never more will trouble you, trouble you_."

_Peter Bell the Second_, as it is convenient, though not strictly accurate, to call Reynold's "antenatal Peter," was more popular than the original. By May a third edition had been called for, and this contained fresh stanzas and additional notes.

Another parody, which ridiculed the affection for donkeys displayed both by Wordsworth and Coleridge, was called _The Dead a.s.ses: A Lyrical Ballad_; and an elaborate production, the author of which I have not been able to discover, was published later on in the year, _Benjamin the Waggoner_ (Baldwin, Craddock and Joy, 1819), which, although the t.i.tle suggests _The Waggoner_ of Wordsworth, is entirely taken up with making fun of _Peter Bell_. This parody--and it is certainly neither pointless nor unskilful--chiefly deals with the poet's fantastic prologue. Then, no less a person than Sh.e.l.ley, writing to Leigh Hunt from Florence in November of the same year, enclosed a _Peter Bell the Third_ which he desired should be printed, yet in such a form as to conceal the name of the author. Perhaps Hunt thought it indiscreet to publish this not very amusing skit, and it did not see the light till long after Sh.e.l.ley's death. Finally, as though the very spirit of parody danced in the company of this strange poem, Wordsworth himself chronicled its ill-fate in a sonnet imitated from Milton's defence of "Tetrachordon," singing how, on the appearance of _Peter Bell_,

_a harpy brood On Bard and Hero clamourously fell_.

Of the poem which enjoyed so singular a fate, Lord Houghton has quietly remarked that it could not have been written by a man with a strong sense of humour. This is true of every part of it, of the stiff and self-sufficient preface, and of the grotesque prologue, both of which in all probability belong to 1819, no less than of the story itself, in its three cantos or parts, which bear the stamp of Alfoxden and 1798. The tale is not less improbable than uninteresting. In the first part, a very wicked potter or itinerant seller of pots, Peter Bell, being lost in the woodland, comes to the borders of a river, and thinks to steal an a.s.s which he finds pensively hanging its head over the water; Peter Bell presently discovers that the dead body of the master of the a.s.s is floating in the river just below. (The poet, as he has naively recorded, read this incident in a newspaper.) In the second part Peter drags the dead man to land, and starts on the a.s.s's back to find the survivors. In the third part a vague spiritual chastis.e.m.e.nt falls on Peter Bell for his previous wickedness. Plot there is no more than this, and if proof were wanted of the inherent innocence of Wordsworth's mind, it is afforded by the artless struggles which he makes to paint a very wicked man. Peter Bell has had twelve wives, he is indifferent to primroses upon a river's brim, and he beats a.s.ses when they refuse to stir. This is really all the evidence brought against one who is described, vaguely, as combining all vices that "the cruel city breeds."

That which close students of the genius of Wordsworth will always turn to seek in _Peter Bell_ is the sincere sentiment of nature and the studied simplicity of language which inspire its best stanzas. The narrative is clumsy in the extreme, and the attempts at wit and sarcasm ludicrous. Yet _Peter Bell_ contains exquisite things. The Primrose stanza is known to every one; this is not so familiar:

_The dragon's wing, the magic ring, I shall not covet for my dower.

If I along that lowly way With sympathetic heart may stray And with a soul of power_.

Nor this, with its excruciating simplicity, its descriptive accent of 1798:

_I see a blooming Wood-boy there, And, if I had the power to say How sorrowful the wanderer is, Your heart would be as sad as his Till you had kiss'd his tears away!

Holding a hawthorn branch in hand, All bright with berries ripe and red; Into the cavern's mouth he peeps-- Thence back into the moonlight creeps; What seeks the boy?--the silent dead!_

It is when he wishes to describe how Peter Bell became aware of the dead body floating under the nose of the patient a.s.s that Wordsworth loses himself in uncouth similes. Peter thinks it is the moon, then the reflection of a cloud, then a gallows, a coffin, a shroud, a stone idol, a ring of fairies, a fiend. Last of all the poet makes the Potter, who is gazing at the corpse, exclaim:

_Is it a party in a parlour?

Cramm'd just as they on earth were cramm'd-- Some sipping punch, some sipping tea, But, as you by their faces see, All silent and all d.a.m.ned!_

So deplorable is the waggishness of a person, however gifted, who has no sense of humour! This simile was too much for the gravity even of intimate friends like Southey and Lamb, and after the second edition it disappeared.

THE FANCY

THE FANCY: _A Selection from the Poetical Remains of the late Peter Corcoran, of Gray's Inn, student at law. With a brief Memoir of his life. London: printed for Taylor & Hessey, Fleet Street_. 1820.

The themes of the poets run in a very narrow channel. Since the old heroic times when the Homers and the Gunnlaugs sang of battle with the sleet of lances hurtling around them, a great calm has settled down upon Parna.s.sus. Generation after generation pipes the same tune of love and Nature, of the liberal arts and the illiberal philosophies; the same imagery, the same metres, meander within the same polite margins of conventional subject. Ever and anon some one attempts to break out of the groove. In the eighteenth century they made a valiant effort to sing of The Art of Preserving Health, and of The Fleece and of The Sugar-Cane, but the innovators lie stranded, like c.u.mbrous whales, on the sh.o.r.e of the ocean of Poesy. Flaubert's friend, Louis Bouilhet, made a inartful attempt to tune the stubborn lyre to music of the birthday of the world, to battles of the ichthyosaurus and the plesiosaurus, to loves of the mammoth and the mastodon. But the public would have none of it, though ensphered in faultless verso, and the poets fled back to their flames and darts, and to the primrose at the river's brim. There is, however, something pathetic, and something that pleasantly reminds us of the elasticity of the human intellect in these failures; and the book before us is an amusing example of such eccentric efforts to enlarge the sphere of the poetic activity.

This little volume is called _The Fancy_, and it does not appear to me certain that the virtuous American conscience know what that means. If the young ladies from Wells or Wellesley inquire ingenuously, "Tell us where is Fancy bred?" we should have to reply, with a jingle, In the fists, not in the head. The poet himself, in a fit of unusual candour, says: