William Wordsworth
Page 30
He also had to admit that Brougham was a good speaker, even passing on one of his jokes to Lord Lowther. He’d heard Brougham speak in Grasmere, where he’d fallen upon the local rector and the local butcher, mocking them in public, knowing they were both strong Lowther supporters. ‘He concluded his lampoon,’ William reported, ‘with this elegant witticism—that the Spirit and the Flesh were both against him.…’ It says much for Brougham’s oratory that he could appeal to the rabble, make jokes about the tradesmen and also include clever insults to amuse the educated.
The highlight of the election was Brougham’s own triumphal entry into Kendal. William and Dorothy had got themselves a good vantage point, in the window of a house overlooking the place chosen for him to give his speech, and even Dorothy had to admit it was a stirring display, despite a snow-storm which greeted the great arrival:
Music, banners, horsemen, all joining in one huzza, fearless of the storm … one condensed line in motion wedging in the horsemen and Carriages … the spectacle was grand. If the cause had been better, my feelings as a Spectator would have been really sublime. Of course when he appeared at the window, he was hailed by a tremendous shout—or when anything fell from his lips that particularly took their fancies, the cry of applause was repeated with more or less vehemence. I could have fancied him one of the French Demagogues of the Tribunal of Terror at certain times, when he gathered a particular fierceness into his face. He is very like a Frenchman.
Dorothy took detailed notes of Brougham’s speech, like a good private secretary, and William sent a copy of her notes to Lord Lonsdale, like a good informer, including even the personal attacks on the Lowther family. Brougham made great play with Lowther Castle, pointing out sarcastically that it had formerly been Lowther Hall, till they’d recently spent a fortune rebuilding it on a vast scale, turning it into a Gothic masterpiece. ‘They have great riches,’ declaimed Brougham. ‘How did they get their riches? It comes out of your pockets!’ Loud cheers all round.
Brougham attacked William personally (though not by name) knowing he must be watching somewhere, calling him ‘the most active of the secret agents, a man with a sinecure in the country, with nothing else or very little to live upon’. He then warmed to his theme, referring to William firstly as an anonymous writer, and then, more specifically, as a poet. This particular poet, he said, worked hard at being a secret agent, though ‘it was much harder work to read his writings’. All Brougham’s immediate entourage laughed exceedingly heartily at this, though presumably most of the rabble didn’t understand the joke.
As one might expect, the Lowthers, having controlled Westmorland for so long, won the day, and Lonsdale’s two sons got over 1,000 votes each and took both seats; but Brougham did surprisingly well, obtaining 889 votes. William and the Lowthers didn’t cease their activities once the election was over, knowing they had to keep vigilant from then on and fight future elections in the same yellow spirit, which they did.
The new paper, the Westmorland Gazette, first appeared in the early summer of 1818, just as the election was reaching its climax, so it didn’t play such a vital part in the campaign, but it remained a Lowther platform for many years. William was successful in his search for a suitable person to be its editor, finding a friend to take it over after it had been going for just a few weeks. It was young Thomas De Quincey.
De Quincey’s misdemeanours were forgotten—or, at least, partly forgotten—when William recommended him for the job: ‘The editorship of the new Kendal paper has passed into the hands of a most able man, one of my particular Friends, but whether he is fit (I mean on the score of punctuality) for such a service, remains to be seen.’ William still blamed De Quincey for the delays in getting his Cintra pamphlet through the press nine years previously, but De Quincey assured him that his punctuality had ‘altered since I last had the happiness to associate with you’. It was a generous gesture on William’s part, to help someone who had now fallen on rather hard times—stuck with a wife and young child, deserted by many of his old friends and with no regular income—but, at the same time, William felt he could use De Quincey to his own advantage, believing that he could be trusted politically, even if his personal habits might not be altogether desirable.
Judging by the look of the early issues, De Quincey tried very hard, filling the pages with juicy court cases to raise the circulation and writing many of his own leaders, attacking the enemies of the Tories in good rabble-rousing fashion. At times, he rather overdid the invective, so that Lord Lonsdale himself began to be slightly worried. ‘I think our own Kendal paper is now getting too libellous. Last week’s specimen is certainly a blackguard production.’
De Quincey’s initial burst of enthusiasm and activity didn’t last long and very soon he was writing the whole paper from home in Dove Cottage, over in Grasmere, hardly ever appearing at the office in Kendal. He was reprimanded by the proprietors in June 1819 for missing the London news, for not contacting the printer and for residing at such a great distance from the office, failings which would be hard to excuse in even the most gifted writer. He announced in the columns of the paper in July that he had received a letter from one of the proprietors which he proposed to ‘notice fully next week’. Alas, they got him first, extracted his resignation before he could reply publicly. He was eased out, after fourteen months in the job, leaving the paper established as a Tory rag, but with a loss of £42 in its first year of trading. It is a pity he never got his reply published. It would have been interesting to see if he had turned against the Fine Folks who had hired him. As it was, the fine folks went on to flourish and find fresh fortune.
The first volume of new poetry which William published after his move to Rydal Mount was dedicated to the Earl of Lonsdale: ‘Illustrious peer, a token of high respect and gratitude sincere.’ This was The Excursion which came out in 1814, followed the next year by a new edition of William’s Collected Poems and by The White Doe of Rylstone, the poem he had written some years before but had kept back. He had published no poetry for seven years, after that mauling he’d had over his 1807 Poems, but his friends were full of hope this time.
The Excursion was treated as a major literary event, which indeed it was. It was William’s first long poem (some four hundred and twenty pages) to be published, and had taken him almost twenty years to complete. It was meant, as he explained in a rather confusing preface, to come after his long proposed ‘The Recluse’—a work which he never completed, apart from a section called ‘Home at Grasmere’. Coleridge had always wanted William to produce a major poem, instead of so many short pieces. Crabb Robinson was full of excitement and so was Southey. The critics were equally excited and they cleared the pages in readiness. The big names among them were commissioned and they were given an enormous amount of space for their reviews, between two and three thousand words each. Imagine any poem today being given such attention.
Beforehand, William himself was rather cynically jocular about the critics’ possible reaction. ‘I am about to print (do not start!) eight thousand lines, which is but a small portion of what I shall oppress the world with, if strength and life do not fail me. I shall be content if the Publication pays its expenses, for Mr Scott and your friend Lord B. flourishing at the rate they do, how can an honest Poet hope to thrive?’ These remarks were made in a private letter to a London literary friend, Samuel Rogers. If only William could occasionally have been as light and self-deprecating in his public pronouncements. Once again, his new preface—like the one to his collected poems—put many people off, partly by its arrogance and self-importance, and partly by the sheer difficulty in understanding it.
The comment about Scott and Lord Byron wasn’t meant entirely as a joke. William came to hate Byron, as a poet and as a person, considering him both evil and immoral. Scott he greatly liked as a person, and they were always good friends, but he never considered him a real poet—by which of course he meant a poet like Wordsworth. Scott simply told stirring tales, with lots of c
olour and emotion, but had no philosophy of poetry. He was the kindest and most genuinely loved of all the literary giants of the time—a time noted for its venomous literary back-biting—and he was quite without self-importance or arrogance. He agreed with Wordsworth: he didn’t think his own poetry was very good and always rated Wordsworth and Southey higher than himself.
William was in a way slightly envious of Scott’s and Byron’s huge commercial success. Even with his friend Scott, he could be a little spiteful behind his back, though William’s family were at least aware of his lingering jealousy. In another letter to Samuel Rogers, William adds a nice PS about Scott’s poetry:
What you say of W. Scott reminds me of an Epigram something like the following —
Tom writes his Verses with huge speed,
Faster than Printer’s boy can set ’em,
Faster than we can read,
And only not so fast as we forget ’em.
Mrs W, poor Woman! who sits by me, says, with a kind of sorrowful smile—this is spite, for you know that Mr Scott’s verses are the delight of the Times and that thousands can repeat scores of pages.
Scott himself hoped William would do well with his new volumes of poetry—he’d personally provided some of the background material for The White Doe and had discussed the work in many letters to William.
The great critical brains of the time thought they knew best. Jeffrey, of the Edinburgh Review, made his opinion of The Excursion clear in the very first sentence of his extensive review: ‘This will never do.’ It doesn’t exactly make you want to read on. Jeffrey did admit there were some good single lines, ‘that sparkle like gems in a desert and startle us with an intimation of the great poetic powers that lie buried in the rubbish that has been heaped around them’.
Hazlitt wrote a long review for The Examiner, which wasn’t as savage but was also a condemnation; he regretted that the skill with which William had chosen his material wasn’t equal to his skill in writing about it. He likened The Excursion to a stupendous structure, which had been left half-finished and suffered to moulder into decay. In passing, Hazlitt, who had long since ceased to be a friend of William or of his politics, had a swipe at the inhabitants of the ‘boasted mountain districts’ William persisted in writing about, calling them stupid, selfish and insensitive. He was presumably thinking of those natives who had hounded him out for his misdemeanours.
Charles Lamb, in private letters, had been flattering about The Excursion, and Wordsworth prevailed on him to write a review, which he did at last; but it was hacked about and cut and didn’t help the sales. Coleridge kept quiet for months, making no comments to his friends, and when he eventually told Wordsworth what he thought, it was obvious he was disappointed. He knew the poem was nothing like as good as the unpublished work, The Prelude. On the whole, this view is still held today, though there are sections of The Excursion which are still studied and admired by scholars, such as that about the ruined cottage. It was the longest poem Wordsworth ever wrote—The Prelude, when it was finally published, was slightly shorter—and is very rambling and didactic. The poet-hero wanders into the Lake District, where he meets several characters, such as a Parson and a Pedlar, who all sit and tell long tales, with Wordsworth using them as mouthpieces to elaborate his views on life, covering everything from the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution to the Church of England and blindness.
The Collected Poems of 1815 were interesting in that Wordsworth rearranged his Lyrical Ballads, plus all the other poems included in the volume, into different sections, according to their mood, such as ‘Poems of Childhood’ and ‘Poems of the Imagination’. There were some new poems, such as ‘Yarrow Visited’, and three poems written by Dorothy (though he said they were by a ‘female friend’). It was the Preface, however, that got most attention; it either annoyed or stimulated people, since, in effect, Wordsworth tried in it to defend himself and his poetry from previous attacks. He wrote it in a very magisterial style, expounding at great length on his own definitions of ‘fancy’ and ‘imagination’.
The White Doe of Rylstone, which William personally always thought was one of his finest poems, didn’t get as much attention as The Excursion, but was treated in a similar manner. The Edinburgh Review began in its usual uncompromising style: ‘This, we think, has the merit of being the very worst poem we ever saw imprinted in a quarto volume.…’ The reviewer went on to consider whether it was all a joke—a satire by someone pretending to write in the style of Mr Wordsworth—but no, they decided it must be genuine: ‘Nothing in the nature of a joke could be so insupportably dull.’ The Monthly Review said it was now tired of pointing out Mr Wordsworth’s errors, and the Eclectic Review dismissed the poem as ‘arrogant egotism’.
One of the many obstacles to the success of the new publications, apart from those damning reviews, was their price. The Excursion cost two guineas, an enormous sum for those days. (It was only in the early 1970s that virtually all book prices jumped above the £2 level.) William tried his hardest to promote sales, writing letters to his well-off friends, hoping they would buy; when he did give a free copy to friends, such as Charles Lloyd, it was on the understanding that it should not be loaned to anyone. He personally refused a copy to a lady whom he knew could well afford it: ‘a widow with £1,500 per annum … a blue stocking Dame who considered two guineas an outrageous price’.
Signing sessions were unknown in those days, as were publicity appearances, but William, in his modest way, mounted a public relations campaign on his own behalf. One day, he decided to take The Excursion to a rich old lady to whom he read out choice passages, in the hope that she would be tempted, or persuaded, into buying her own copy. Dorothy has a description of their foray in a letter to Sarah:
William and Mary and little Willy paid a visit to old Mrs Knott yesterday with the Exn. in hand, William intending to read the old Lady the history of the Grasmere Knight. She could not hear his loud voice, but understood the story very well when her Niece read it. Today they have returned the Book and poor Miss K. has written a complimentary but alas! unintelligible note. She must have been in a strange ruffled state of mind. She concludes however by saying in plain words that she had written to Kendal to order the Book. I tell William that the family made a trading voyage of it. Certainly the Book would never have been bought by Miss K. if Willy and his Father and Mother had stayed quietly at home.
Despite such personal efforts, the sales were poor. After a year, only three hundred copies of the first edition of five hundred had been sold. The publishers, Longmans, doubtless had to price it highly, because of its great length and because they knew, or feared, it wouldn’t be a best-seller. William kept on working hard at promoting sales, hoping desperately for a second and cheaper edition, which would bring the poem to the attention of the less well off. He comforted himself by telling everyone about the famous people who had told him they had personally loved the book, and by dismissing the reviewers as idiots:
Jeff. has already printed off a Review beginning with these elegant and decisive words ‘This will not do’, the sage critic then proceeding to show cause why. This precious piece is what the Coxcomb’s Idolators call a crushing review. I much doubt whether he has read three pages of the poem.… The Bishop of London is in raptures, the Duke of Devonshire made it his companion in a late jaunt to Ireland, a Lady of Liverpool, a Quaker, breaks through all forms of ceremony to express her gratitude by letter.
William affected to be above the attacks and, with his eye steadily aimed at posterity, to be immune from the critics’ puny arrows, maintaining he never stooped to reading their pathetic reviews—it was always other people who told him about them, or brought them to his attention: ‘I am astonished that you can find no better use for your money than spending it on those silly Reviews,’ he wrote to Sarah, finishing with an affectionate farewell, to show he was in good humour. ‘I send you love and a kiss, two or three if you like, that prove the better for being liberal.’
William was greatly saddened by the attacks, despite his lofty dismissals and his bitter jokes at his own expense. ‘Why don’t you hire somebody to abuse you?’ he wrote to a literary friend in 1817. ‘For myself, I begin to fear that I should soon be forgotten if it were not for my enemies.’
At other times, he seriously thought of retiring, or said he was seriously thinking of it: ‘As to publishing I shall give it up, as nobody will buy what I send forth; nor can I expect it seeing what stuff the public appetite is set upon.’
His old friends were equally hurt by the attacks on him, especially the Edinburgh Review’s, which was the talk of all the literary circles of the day. ‘Jeffrey, I hear, has written what his admirers call a crushing review of The Excursion,’ Southey wrote to Walter Scott. ‘He might as well seat himself upon Skiddaw and fancy that he could crush the mountain. I heartily wish Wordsworth may one day meet with him and lay him alongside, yard arm and yard arm in argument.’
Southey, who suffered by being associated with William and was attacked just as lustily by the Edinburgh Review, was the friend who had previously observed to William that though Jeffrey could not spoil their laurels, he might mildew their corn. The bad reviews undoubtedly did have an effect on William’s sales. The books would probably not have been great popular sellers, but over twenty years his income would have been greatly improved, if it had not been for the Edinburgh Review.