William Wordsworth

by Hunter Davies

  It’s nice to see that his sense of humour hadn’t left him—he displayed the sort of dry wit he’d used on the affected parson in The Prelude. It was the beginning of a more serious approach to religion, confirming him soon in his strong support of the Established Church. At Coleorton, however, it looks as if he went to church for the sake of appearances as much as anything, feeling that as he was living in the squire’s house, and using the squire’s servants and amenities, he should do the correct thing by the villagers.

  The Wordsworths all returned to Dove Cottage in the spring of 1808, but not for long. They’d at last got a new house to move into—a much bigger, handsomer one, still in Grasmere—and it appeared to solve all their problems. It was arranged that Coleridge should have a room in it, where he could work and where Sarah Hutchinson could act as his secretary. Coleridge had decided to start his own magazine, something he’d attempted earlier in his life, which he would produce from Grasmere and which would yield him an income; at the same time he would be near, but not too near, his wife.

  Mrs Coleridge wasn’t enthusiastic about this arrangement at first. Her big worry was that the disgrace of their separation would become public; Dorothy wrote about this in her letters at great length, thinking Mrs Coleridge was being very selfish, and worried only by her own image and reputation. The Wordsworths now thought that the separation should be made public, once and for all. In the end, the situation was greatly eased by Coleridge moving in with the Wordsworths at Grasmere. Hartley and Derwent went to a local school in Ambleside, spending weekends with the Wordsworths, and Mrs Coleridge was able to visit her sons fairly often at Grasmere, so that a semblance of family togetherness was kept up.

  Coleridge, in his usual irresolute way, nearly ruined all the careful arrangements by not appearing. He hung around London after their winter at Coleorton, still unable to face being so near his wife; then he fell ill and said he was dying. William had to go down specially to London to find out what was wrong with him, doing some business at the same time in connection with his poems and having a passing visionary experience while walking down Fleet Street, of all places:

  I left Coleridge and walked towards the City in a very thoughtful and melancholy state of mind [he wrote to Sir George]. I had passed through Temple Bar and by St Dunstans, noting nothing, and entirely occupied with my own thoughts, when looking up, I saw before the avenue of Fleet Street, silent, empty, and pure white, with a sprinkling of new fallen snow, not a cart or carriage to obstruct the view, no noise, only a few soundless and dusky foot-passengers here and there; you remember the elegant curve of Ludgate Hill and towering above it was the huge and majestic form of St Pauls, solemnized by the thin veil of falling snow. I cannot say how much I was affected at this unthought of sight, in such a place, and what a blessing I felt there in habits of exalted imagination. My sorrow was controlled and my uneasiness of mind notquieted and relieved altogether, seemed at once to receive the gift of an anchor of security.

  William’s uneasiness had been caused by Coleridge’s accusation that he had somehow been tampering with Sarah’s letters, influencing her affections and turning her against Coleridge. It was nonsense, and part of Coleridge’s growing paranoia, but the trouble was eventually settled to everyone’s apparent satisfaction. Sarah was eager to help Coleridge in any way she could, and keen to work with him on his new project in the new house, so at last Coleridge arrived in Grasmere and by the autumn of 1808 they’d all settled down again. Life for the Coleridges and the Wordsworths was now once more very much as it had been before, or so it seemed.…

  The work which Wordsworth had been so busy on for so long was another selection of new poems, in two volumes, which were published in the summer of 1807 and are usually known simply as the Poems in Two Volumes. These poems represented almost seven years’ work, as he’d published nothing new since the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads, and so they were eagerly awaited by his publishers, by his growing number of admirers, and also, alas, by the even more rapidly growing number of his enemies.

  Looked at today, the two volumes contain some of Wordsworth’s finest work, the peak of his last great creative phase, poems still enjoyed by the general public and admired by academics, such as ‘Daffodils’, ‘To the Daisy’, ‘She was a Phantom of Delight’, ‘Among all Lovely Things’, ‘Ode to Duty’, the sonnet on Westminster Bridge, ‘The World is too much with us’, ‘The Solitary Reaper’ and ‘My Heart leaps up’. In all, there were one hundred and thirteen new poems, of different lengths, in different moods, in different forms, reflecting different but important stages in his life over the previous seven years, from the Scottish tour, and from waiting on the shore at Calais, to his new spirit of political patriotism. Some were complicated and philosophical. Others were simple verses about simple, natural objects. The second volume closed with his great ‘Ode on the Intimations of Immortality’.

  It was almost as if the critics had been waiting for him, sharpening their claws, having already made up their minds what they thought about him—and especially about his own views on poetry, as expressed in the Preface in every new edition of Lyrical Ballads which had appeared over the last five years. Even Walter Scott, while liking Wordsworth greatly as a person and admiring many of his poems, was worried slightly by what Wordsworth, and to a certain extent Southey, appeared to be doing: ‘Were it not for the unfortunate idea of forming a new school of poetry, these men are calculated to give it a new impulse; but I think sometimes they lose their energy in trying to find not a better but a different path from what has been travelled by their predecessors.’

  This was a very mild and affectionate way of putting it; but then, Scott was a friend. Wordsworth’s enemies also saw him as the head of a new school, but one they hated intensely. The idea of a School of Lake Poets, which had stuck in the public mind, had no strict basis in the facts. Coleridge had been away for about three years and had in any case written very little poetry about or in the Lakes. Southey, although a friend and neighbour, was never a poetic colleague, never a collaborator or even a fellow poetic spirit. It was the accident of marriage which had brought him to the Lakes. The school, such as it was, consisted of Wordsworth. It has to be admitted, however, that Wordsworth did see himself as a school on his own, someone sent to put poetry back on its feet, a self-elected arbiter of true poetic taste.

  I’ve seen bad reviews in my lifetime, but I don’t think I’ve ever read anywhere such vicious reviews as the ones Wordsworth received in 1807. It makes one feel protective towards him, sorry for an honest man made to suffer in such a way. It’s impossible now fully to understand what the critics thought he had done to deserve such an annihilation. We know he had to expect to be taken down a peg or two because of his presumptuous Preface, but as for the vitriol, one can only mutter as excuse that it was the style of the times to be so savage.

  The critical coverage of the various editions of Lyrical Ballads had been middling, roughly three bad and three good reviews, spread over some years. It was word of mouth which took them to four editions. Immediately, with the 1807 Poems, the big guns were out, and, over the next year, ten extensive reviews or articles were devoted to Wordsworth—and each one more or less slammed him.

  The first review, in July 1807, was in the Monthly Literary and was by Lord Byron—the greatest Wordsworth-hater of his age, though this review was written early in his career, when he was just nineteen and still stretching his wings, or claws. Compared with the other reviews, it expresses what one might call a mild dislike.

  Byron started his review by being rather kind and praising Lyrical Ballads—like almost all other young writers and poets of the day, he had admired, enjoyed and been greatly influenced by them—but then he quickly went on to say that this new offering was not equal to Wordsworth’s former efforts. (It’s strange how, even today, reviewers always seem to catch people after their peak, a peak which at the time was hardly noticed by anyone.) Byron found a couple of poems he quite liked for their ‘na
tive elegance, natural and unaffected, totally devoid of the tinsel embellishments and abstract hyperboles of several contemporary sonneteers’. He particularly picked out the patriotic poem, ‘Another year, another deadly blow’. A couple of other reviewers, when they managed to find a kind word to say, also picked on this or another poem, ‘The Happy Warrior’, which contained some manly lines. After the death of Nelson, there had been a wave of fervent patriotism throughout the country, which even tough, cynical reviewers dare not mock.

  After his few words of praise, Byron then got down to tearing the rest of the hundred-odd poems to shreds, calling the language puerile and the ideas commonplace. He had good sport with a poem called ‘Moods of my own Mind’—‘We certainly wish these Moods had been less frequent’—and then quoted the nursery rhyme ‘Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle,’ saying that many of Wordsworth’s poems were in the same namby-pamby style and the ‘same exquisite measure’.

  He managed one final nice word, noting that Wordsworth did have a genius worthy of higher pursuits, if only he wouldn’t confine his muse to such trivial subjects.

  The next review, in the Critical Review, was an absolute, non-stop attack, saying a silly book like this was a serious evil, that Wordsworth should be ashamed of himself, that even ridicule had failed to bring him to his senses, and that he was now beyond a laughing matter. He should practise self-denial and humility, wean himself from vanity and stop ‘drivelling to a redbreast and pouring out nauseous and nauseating sensibilities to weeds and insects’.

  Wordsworth had feared that a known enemy of his would review the book in the Critical Review and he’d written in advance to his friend Wrangham, who often reviewed for this magazine, asking him to use any influence to keep the book from the hostile critic. This particular enemy didn’t in fact write the review, but this had obviously made no difference. ‘Out of the frying pan into the fire,’ William sadly remarked afterwards in a letter to Wrangham.

  The worst, most extensive and most damaging review was by the dreaded Jeffrey in the Edinburgh Review. This magazine spared few people, and had a go at Byron the next year, savaging his first book of poems. (Byron later turned on them in a famous attack on the ‘Scotch Reviewers’.) Jeffrey said that Lyrical Ballads had been deservedly popular, but the new poems were childish, tedious, miserable, disgusting, absurd; Wordsworth was obviously raving and many lines simply made no sense; the new school was perverse and in bad taste, and must be killed off at once before it gained any more ground. Jeffrey went so far as to hope that these new volumes would not sell—in fact, he was convinced they would never sell—and he finished by looking ‘for a verdict against publication’. One later reviewer cynically welcomed the new poems—saying that they signified ‘the suicide of the new school’.

  It would be too cruel, even now, to go on any further. There were admittedly some banal lines and some flat verses in the collection. One poem addressed to ‘The Spade of a Friend’ had all the wits falling about in mirth, and there were numerous verses to weeds and insects, but it’s remarkable that not one of the ten reviews praised the great ‘Immortality’ ode, or even mentioned the dozen or so other poems which appear in all the anthologies and selections to this day.

  Considering the violence of the onslaught, William took it all very stoically. The London wits and witlings, he said, were too busy running around from rout to rout in the senseless hurry of their idle lives to have any time for love or reverence. The critics and the public would have to be educated. ‘Trouble not yourself upon this present reception,’ he wrote to Lady Beaumont. ‘Of what moment is that compared with what I trust is their destiny, to console the afflicted, to add sunshine to daylight by making the happy happier, to teach the young and the gracious of every age, to see, to think and feel and therefore to become more actively and securely virtuous; this is their office which I trust they will faithfully perform long after we are mouldered in our graves.’

  He had never expected the volumes to sell well, not like The Lay of the Last Minstrel, nor to be critically well received. While in London, he’d been told of a gentleman who’d picked up a copy of the poems, glanced through them and chanced to light on ‘Daffodils’, remarking ‘A fine morsel this for the Reviewers’. ‘When this was told me, for I was not present, I observed that there were two lines in that little Poem which if thoroughly felt, would annihilate nine tenths of the Reviews of the Kingdom; the lines I alluded to were those: “They flash upon that inward eye, which is the bliss of Solitude.” ’

  He maintained that he hadn’t seen all the reviews, having read some of them simply by chance, and that he’d only been told, for example, how malicious and spiteful the Critical Review had been. ‘But Peace to this gentleman, and all his Brethren,’ as Southey neatly says, ‘they cannot blast our laurels, but they may mildew our corn.’

  William put on a brave face, but there’s little doubt he was deeply hurt and distressed. He had with him the finished manuscript of a new long poem, The White Doe of Rylstone, when he had gone to visit Coleridge in London, and Coleridge helped in the negotiations with the publishers. William was demanding a hundred guineas for a thousand copies, on condition that it was published untouched, which at first the publishers refused to do, though they later consented. But now William himself refused to proceed, as he had become disillusioned with the whole idea of publication, despite Coleridge’s efforts to persuade him to agree to it. The mauling he’d received from the reviewers had obviously affected him.

  Dorothy was distraught when she heard he was now opposed to publishing his new poem. They were just about to move into their new and bigger house and needed the money desperately. She took the view that to give up now would only make the reviewers the winners:

  As to the Outcry against you, I would defy it—what matter if you get your 100 guineas into your pocket? Besides, it is like as if they had run you down, when it is known you have a poem ready for publishing, and keep it back.… Without money what can we do? New house! new furniture; such a large family; two servants.

  We cannot go on so for another half year. We must … dismiss one of our servants and work our fingers off our poor bones. Do, dearest William, do pluck up your disgust to publishing. It is but a little trouble and all will be over and we shall be wealthy and at our ease for one year, at least.

  William stuck to his decision not to publish The White Doe, and he also kept back an even longer and, to him, more important poem, The Excursion, which he was soon near to completing. In fact, he published no new poems for another seven years. All the same, the Wordsworth tribe, closely followed by Coleridge, did move into the big new house, did get themselves some furniture, and did keep on the two servants, despite the lack of those hundred guineas in William’s pocket.

  THE WORLD IS TOO MUCH WITH US

  One of the many new poems published in the 1807 collection. He was not aware, when writing, how viciously the outside world would react to them.

  THE world is too much with us; late and soon,

  Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:

  Little we see in Nature that is ours;

  We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

  This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

  The winds that will be howling at all hours,

  And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

  For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

  It moves us not.—Great God! I’d rather be

  A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

  So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

  Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

  Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

  Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

  13

  The Great Estrangement

  1808–1813

  YOU may recall Wordsworth’s horrid remarks about that new house being built in Grasmere, the ‘abomination’ which would ‘ruin’ his beloved vale. This was the hous
e, Allan Bank, into which he moved in 1808.

  It’s a large, handsome, detached house, set in its own grounds just outside the village of Grasmere, under the slopes of Silver Howe, on the other side of the Grasmere Vale from Dove Cottage. It has subsequently been altered, but as residences go, it was and is much more desirable than the little cottage at Town End, not just in size but in its superior position, raised slightly above the village, without that rather enclosed, rather dampish, claustrophobic feeling which lingers over the houses in the valley bottom, especially on damp, rainy days—which, alas, are a feature of the Vale of Grasmere. The Wordsworths took it because nothing else was available and its size was perfect for their large household. They grew to like both it and Mr Crump, whom they’d earlier disparaged. William even came back especially from a trip to Penrith, just because Mr Crump wanted some advice on laying out the gardens, and all of them enjoyed picnics with the Crump family on Grasmere island.

  They needed a large house because, as Dorothy half boasted in a letter, they regularly found themselves a family of fifteen people. It had all started with just William and Dorothy, but now they were a veritable commune. Firstly, there were William and Mary and their four children—the fourth, another girl called Catherine, was born in September 1808, a few months after they’d moved into Allan Bank.