A good many people were pleased--not without malice--when Professor
Harper discovered a few years ago that Wordsworth had an illegitimate
daughter. It was like hearing a piece of scandal about an archbishop.
As a matter of fact, the story, as Professor Harper tells it, is not a
scandal; it is merely a puzzle. The figures in the episode are names
and shadows: we know almost nothing as regards their feelings for each
other or what it was that prevented the lovers from marrying. Professor
Harper believes that Wordsworth has left a disguised version of the
story in _Vaudracour and Julia_. Wordsworth himself says of _Vaudracour
and Julia_ that “the facts are true,” and the main “facts” in the
poem are that the lovers wish to marry, cannot gain their parent’s
consent, and give way to passion, and that after this their parents,
instead of softening in their attitude, insist more harshly than ever
on keeping them apart. Wordsworth is vehement in his contention that
Vaudracour was no common seducer yielding to the lusts of the flesh,
and the suggestion is fairly clear that the youth thought he was taking
the only way to make marriage inevitable. Consider these lines, which
impute honourable motives, if not honourable conduct, to the lover:
So passed the time, till whether through effect
Of some unguarded moment that dissolved
Virtuous restraint--ah, speak it, think it, not!
Deem rather that the fervent youth, who saw
So many bars between his present state
And the dear haven where he wished to be
In honourable wedlock with his love,
Was in his judgment tempted to decline
To perilous weakness, and entrust his cause
To nature for a happy end of all;
Deem that by such fond hope the youth was swayed
And bear with their transgression, when I add
That Julia, wanting yet the name of wife,
Carried about her for a secret grief,
The promise of a mother.
These lines have an ethical rather than a poetical interest. Whether
Wordsworth, in writing them, was consciously or subconsciously
attempting his own moral justification, we do not know. But Professor
Harper has collected a number of facts that make it appear likely
that he was. Certainly, the story of Wordsworth and Marie-Anne Vallon
at Orleans in 1792, so far as we know it, might without violence be
dramatised as the story of Vaudracour and Julia.
Bear in mind, for example, the “many bars” that stood in the way of
Wordsworth’s marriage to Marie-Anne, or “Annette,” Vallon. They were
not, as in the poem, barriers of class, but they were the equally
insurmountable barriers of creed, both political and religious.
Wordsworth was a young Englishman, full of the ardour of the
Revolution, and a Protestant of so sceptical a cast that Coleridge
described him as a “semi-atheist.” Annette, for her part, was the child
of parents who were zealots in the cause of Royalism and Catholicism.
They must have regarded the coming of such a suitor as Wordsworth
with the same horror with which a reader of the _Morning Post_ would
learn that his daughter had fallen in love with a Catholic Sinn Feiner
or a Jewish Bolshevist. The position was even more bitter than this
suggests. The sectarian and political passions that raged in France
were more comparable to the passions of Orange Belfast than to any
that can be imagined in the atmosphere of modern England. Wordsworth
may well have appeared to these orthodox parents a representative
of Satan. He was the murder-gang personified. Nor, to make up for
this, was he even a good match. He was an exceedingly poor young man
who had just come of age. Add to this the fact that it was almost
impossible at the time for an orthodox Catholic and Royalist to
marry a Revolutionary sceptic. Marriage had become a State affair
under the Revolution, and no Catholic could permit his daughter to
go through a marriage ceremony that seemed to deny that marriage was
a sacrament. It is true that marriages could still be performed by
the clergy, but only by such clergy as accepted their position under
the new constitution as functionaries of the State. Republican clergy
of this kind would be regarded by the Vallon family as traitors and
scarcely better than atheists. Marriages celebrated by them would be
looked on as invalid--as mere licences to live in sin. Had Wordsworth
become a Catholic, or had he been of a compromising disposition, it
would have been easy enough to find a non-juring priest to perform the
ceremony. But it is unlikely that a priest, who was zealous enough to
face persecution rather than recognise the Republic, would have been
willing to marry one of his flock to a free-thinking revolutionary.
Respectability might urge that, when the lovers had already gone so
far, nothing remained but to make the best of it and permit them to
marry. Fanaticism, however, might well regard such a marriage as but
the adding of one sin to another. The Church itself, by marrying the
sinners, would make itself a partner in the sin. We have to reflect
how adamantine is the faith of the orthodox in order to understand
the “many bars” that hindered the marriage of Wordsworth and Annette.
Remembering this, we cannot dismiss as improbable Professor Harper’s
theory that Wordsworth abandoned Marie-Anne reluctantly, and that when
he settled in Blois, he did so because he had been driven away by her
relatives and yet desired to remain near her.
All we know of Wordsworth, and all the facts in Professor Harper’s
story, make it impossible to believe that he would willingly have
deserted Marie-Anne and his daughter. The baptism of the child was
entered in the registry of baptisms in the parish of Sainte-Croix,
“Williams Wordsodsth” in his absence being represented by a local
official. She was baptised Anne Caroline, and it was as Anne Caroline
Wordsworth, daughter of “Williams Wordsworth, landowner,” that she was
married in Paris about twenty-four years later. Wordsworth appears to
have kept constantly in touch with her and her mother in the meantime,
and, when peace was in sight in 1802, he and his sister Dorothy
determined to cross to France and see them. A meeting took place in
Calais. It was the preliminary to a marriage, but not to marriage with
Annette, who, indeed, never married, but went through life as Madame
Vallon. Two months after the Calais meeting Wordsworth married Mary
Hutchinson. That he had been deeply moved by the meeting with his child
rather than with her mother is suggested by the mood of the sonnet he
wrote at the time: “It is a beauteous evening, calm and free.”
Professor Harper is of opinion that Wordsworth’s love for Marie-Anne
Vallon was an event of supreme importance in his life. He holds that
the facts he has discovered throw “light upon many of Wordsworth’s
poems.” I do not think that on this point he has proved his case. In
his two-volume life of Wordsworth, it may be remembered, he even goes
so far as to assign the “Lucy” of so many beautiful poems to a French
original. Lovers of a great poet are naturally led to speculate as to
the experiences out of which his poems grew. There is nothing of the
vice of Paul Pry in attempting thus to discover the sources of the
experiences the poet communicates in his verse. The theme of every
poet is the experiences that have moved his soul most profoundly.
And many, or most, of those experiences spring from his relations
with other human beings. At the same time, there is no evidence that
Wordsworth in his work was ever influenced by Marie-Anne Vallon as
Keats was influenced by Fanny Brawne. It is doubtful if any women every
really took the place of his sister in his heart. “She gave me eyes,
she gave me ears,” could be said only of Dorothy. It was the fire of
affection, not the fire of passion, that glowed in Wordsworth’s soul.
“Oh, my dear, dear sister!” he cried in one of his letters, “with what
transport shall I again meet you! With what rapture shall I again
wear out the day in your sight. So eager is my desire to see you that
all other obstacles vanish. I see you in a moment running, or rather
flying, to my arms.” He was in life as in literature a devoted brother
rather than a devoted lover. Even Professor Harper can give no other
woman but Dorothy the position of presiding genius over his life and
work. This does not necessarily involve our acceptance of the common
theory that Dorothy was the original around whom the “Lucy” poems were
written. But, had Lucy been a Frenchwoman, Wordsworth would hardly have
written:
I travelled among unknown men
In lands beyond the sea;
Nor England did I know till then
What love I bore to thee....
Among thy mountains did I feel
The joy of my desire;
And she I cherished turned her wheel
Beside an English fire.
To interpret this as a dramatisation of his early passion in France is
to strain probability.[1]
[1] I understand that Professor Harper disclaims what seemed to
me the obvious interpretation of a passage in his book.
Professor Harper, then, has discovered an interesting episode in
Wordsworth’s life, but I do not think he has discovered what may be
called a key episode. It may turn out to have had more influence on
Wordsworth’s destiny than at present appears. But we do not yet know
enough even about the circumstances to get any fresh light from it
either on his work or on his character.
As regards Annette, we learn from a letter of Dorothy’s, written in
1815, that she shared, and continued to share, the Royalist convictions
of her people. She often, Dorothy affirms, “risked her life in defence
of adherents to that cause, and she despised and detested Buonaparte.”
In 1820, Wordsworth, his wife, and Dorothy visited Paris and lived on
intimate terms with Annette, Caroline, and Caroline’s husband. They
even went to lodge in the same street. Of Caroline it was reported
earlier that “she resembles her father most strikingly.” For the rest,
Christopher Wordsworth, Bishop of Lincoln, when writing his uncle’s
biography, said nothing about the matter. He cannot be accused of
having hidden anything of very great significance. The truth is now
out, and we know little more about Wordsworth than we knew before.
XIV
THE POETRY OF POE
“My first object (as usual) was originality,” said Poe, in discussing
the versification of “The Raven.” It is a remarkable fact that the
two great poets of America--Poe and Whitman--were two of the most
deliberately original poets of the nineteenth century--in English
at least. They were both conscious frontiersmen of poetry, drawn to
unmapped territories, settlers on virgin soil. This may help to explain
some of their imperfections. Each of them gives us the impression of a
genius rich but imperfectly cultivated. Different though they were from
each other, they resembled each other in a certain lack of the talent
of order, of taste, of “finish.” They were both capable of lapses from
genius into incompetence, from beauty into provincialism, to an unusual
degree. A contemporary critic said of Poe that he had not talent equal
to his genius. Neither had Whitman. In the greatest poets, genius and
talent go hand in hand. Poe seldom wrote a poem in which his mood seems
to have attained its perfect expression. His poetry does not get near
perfection even in the sense in which Coleridge’s fragments do. It
seems, as a rule, like a first sketch for greater things. His _Complete
Poems_, indeed, is one of the most wonderful sketch-books of a man of
genius in literature.
Poe himself attributed the defects of his work to lack of leisure
rather than to lack of talent. “Events not to be controlled,” he said
in the preface to the 1845 edition of his poems, “have prevented me
from making, at any time, any serious effort in what, under happier
circumstances, would have been the field of my choice. With me poetry
has been not a purpose but a passion, and the passions should be held
in reverence; they must not--they cannot at will be excited, with
an eye to the petty compensations, or the more petty commendations,
of mankind.” Other poets, however, who have lived in as bitter
circumstances as Poe, have written an incomparably greater body of good
poetry. There was in him some flaw that kept him, as a rule, from being
more than a great beginner. It may have been partly due to theatrical
qualities that he inherited from his actress mother. Again and again
he mingles the landscape of dreamland with the tawdry grandeur of
the stage. He takes a footlights view of romance when, having begun
“Lenore” with the lines----
Ah, broken is the golden bowl!--the spirit flown for ever!--
Let the bell toll!--a saintly soul floats on the Stygian river
he continues:
And, Guy de Vere, hast _thou_ no tear?--weep now, or never more.
This, no doubt, was in tune with the fashionable romance of the day,
but Poe’s romantic conceptions at times were those of one who was
especially entranced by stage trappings. He made his heroines rich and
highborn as well as beautiful. In “Lenore” he cries:
Wretches, ye loved her for her wealth, and hated her for her pride!
In “The Sleeper” he speaks of:
The crested palls
Of her grand family funerals.
In “Annabel Lee” he made the very angels heroes of the green-room:
Her highborn kinsmen came
And bore her away from me.
On the other hand, Poe’s theatricalism, though it explains some of the
faults of his poetry, leaves unexplained the fact that he has cast a
greater spell on succeeding poets than has even so great a theatrical
genius as Byron. Poe is one of those poets who are sources of poetry.
He discovered--though not without forerunners such as Coleridge--a
new borderland for the imagination, where death and despair had a new
strangeness. He seems to have reached it, not through mere fancy,
as his imitators do, but through experience. When he was a youth he
worshipped Mrs. Helen Stannard, the mother of one of his friends. She
went mad and died, and for some time after her death Poe used to haunt
her tomb by night, and “when the autumnal rains fell and the winds
wailed mournfully over the graves, he lingered longest, and came away
most regretfully.” J. H. Ingram and other writers have found in these
“solitary churchyard vigils” the clue to “much that seems strange and
abnormal in the poet’s after life.” Love overshadowed by death, beauty
overshadowed by death, remained the recurrent theme of his verse. It is
the theme of his supreme poem, “Annabel Lee,” with its haunting close:
In the sepulchre there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea.
Poe was a poet for whom life was darkened by experience and
illuminated only by visions. In the beginning, romance
loves to nod and sing
With drowsy head and painted wing,
Among the green leaves as they shake
Far down within some shadowy lake.
In time, however, this born day-dreamer can find no comfort in
day-dreaming:
Of late, eternal Condor years
So shake the very Heaven on high
With tumult as they thunder by,
I have no time for idle cares
Through gazing on the unquiet sky.
And when an hour with calmer wings
Its down upon my spirit flings--
That little time with lyre and rhyme
To while away--forbidden things!--
My heart would feel to be a crime
Unless it trembled with the strings.
There is a terrible sincerity in Poe’s sense of the presence of death.
His vision of mortal men, at least, was not theatrical in its gloom:
Mimes, in the form of God on high,
Mutter and mumble low,
And hither and thither fly--
Mere puppets they, who come and go
At bidding of vast formless things
That shift the scenery to and fro,
Flapping from out their Condor wings
Invisible Woe!
Poe and Whitman were both poets preoccupied with the thought of death,
but, whereas Whitman forced himself to praise it, Poe was in revolt
against it as the ultimate tyrant. He saw it as the one thing that
made dreadful those enchanted islands, those enchanted valleys, those
enchanted palaces in which, for him, so much of the beauty of the
world took refuge. He could not reconcile himself to a world that was
governed by mortality. There is the wistfulness of the exile from a
lost Paradise running through his verse. He is essentially a man for
whom the spiritual universe exists. His angels and demons may not
resemble the angels and demons of the churches--may, indeed, be little
more than formulæ in his dreamland. But they are at least the formulæ
of a poet into whose dreams has come the rumour of immortality. He
cannot believe that the City of Death, with its awful stillness, can
last for ever--that city where
Shrines and palaces and towers
(Time-eaten towers that tremble not!)
Resemble nothing that is ours.
Around, by lifting winds forgot,
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.
He feels that somewhere Eldorado is to be found, as it is by the knight
who sought it:
And as his strength
Failed him at length
He met a pilgrim shadow--
“Shadow,” said he,
“Where can it be--
This land of Eldorado?”
“Over the Mountains
Of the Moon,
Down the Valley of the Shadow,
Ride, boldly ride,”
The shade replied--
“If you seek for Eldorado!”
It is true that his vision, whether of life or immortality, has
something of the incoherence of the landscape of his “Dreamland”:
Mountains toppling evermore
Into seas without a shore.
If his imagination passes “out of space, out of time,” it is on the
wings of trance rather than of faith. At the same time, his dreams
would not have made so strong an appeal to generations of readers if
they had been mere sensational fancies, and had not seemed to wander
in a wider universe than we are conscious of in our everyday life.
They cannot be dismissed as the visions of a drugged man. They are the
questionings of a spirit.
It may be that, like some of the decadents of Europe, Poe was preyed
upon by a demon--that he was an outcast poet in whose sky was
The cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.
But in the best of the decadents the soul survived; and if they have
a place in literature it is because they have left a record of the
travels of the prodigal soul in a far country. Poe, though not sharing
their decadence, is also the poet of a far country. That loveliest of
his poems (if we except “Annabel Lee”), “To Helen”--what is it but a
triumphant cry of return? Unlike “The Raven,” it is a poem that never
loses its beauty with repetition. “Annabel Lee” may be the fullest
expression of his genius, but “To Helen” is the most exquisite. Even to
write it down, hackneyed though it is, renews one’s delight:
Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicean barks of yore,
That gently, o’er the perfumed sea,
The weary, way-born wanderer bore
To his own native shore.
On desperate seas long wont to roam,
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece
And the grandeur that was Rome.
Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche
How statue-like I see thee stand
The agate lamp within thy hand!
Ah, Psyche, from the regions which
Are Holy Land!
Here, as nowhere else, Poe achieved coherent and consummate grace of
form. Here, if almost nowhere else, his talent was equal to his genius.
XV
HAWTHORNE
Hawthorne is the only American admitted into the English Men of Letters
Series. This may be partly accidental, and due to the fact that it was
possible to get so fine a critic as Henry James to write about him.
It also suggests, however, that in 1879 Hawthorne was held in higher
esteem than he is held to-day. There are several American writers
about whom we are nowadays more curious. Emerson does not soar at
quite such an altitude as he once did, but he is still an indubitable
figure of genius on the sunny side of the clouds. Thoreau, with the
challenge of his sardonic simplicity, will interest us so long as there
is a society to protest against. Poe, after we have refined him in
the fiercest fires of criticism, remains gold of the most precious.
Whitman holds us as the giant aborigine of democracy as well as the
rhapsodist of brotherhood and death. Washington Irving, on the other
hand, has disappeared except from the schoolbooks, and Oliver Wendell
Holmes has ceased to be read by people under fifty. Longfellow has
become an exiguous contributor to an anthology except in so far as he
is taught, like Irving, to schoolchildren, and Lowell is oftener quoted
by politicians than by critics of letters. There is no need to discuss
just now whether this waning of reputations is likely to be permanent.
It is enough to note that Hawthorne, though he has not waned to the
extent that Longfellow has, has ceased for most readers to be a star of
the first or second magnitude. How many critics would now place him,
as he was once placed, among the great masters of English prose? How
many editors of a series of lives of great writers would unhesitatingly
include in it a life of Nathaniel Hawthorne?
Hawthorne may nevertheless justly be regarded as a classic, and there
have been few writers whose short stories would bear re-reading so
well as Hawthorne’s three-quarters of a century after their first
appearance. The prose, as anyone may see by dipping into Mr. Carl van
Doren’s admirable selection from _Twice-told Tales_, _Mosses from an
Old Manse_, and _The Snow Image_, is beautiful prose, even if it falls
short of supreme greatness. It flows with a rhythm at once charming
and forceful. It is transparent, and through it we can see life as
Hawthorne’s imagination played on it like sunlight refracted through
water. He is a music-maker rather than a phrase-maker in his use of
words. Movement is more to him than metaphor, though he can combine
them attractively, as in the opening sentence of _The Seven Vagabonds_:
Rambling on foot in the spring of my life and the summer of the
year, I came one afternoon to a point which gave me the choice of
three directions.
You may turn Hawthorne’s pages almost at random, and you can scarcely
help noticing example after example of this characteristic rhythm of
his. It is noticeable even in such a simple narrative sentence as that
with which _The Artist of the Beautiful_ opens:
An elderly man, with his pretty daughter on his arm, was passing
along the street, and emerged from the gloom of the cloudy evening
into the light that fell across the pavement from the window of a
small shop.
And, again, we find it in a meditative passage such as:
I saw mankind, in this weary old age of the world, either enduring
a sluggish existence amid the smoke and dust of cities, or, if
they breathed a purer air, still lying down at night with no hope
but to wear out to-morrow, and all the to-morrows which make up
life, among the same dull scenes and in the same wretched toil that
had darkened the sunshine of to-day.
This all flows with something of the noble ease of hexameters, yet
without falling into the vices of pseudo-poetic prose. The mere sound
of his sentences gives Hawthorne’s prose a wonderful momentum that
keeps us interested even when at times we begin to wonder if his
subject-matter is quite as interesting as it ought to be. This grave
and equable momentum is one of his greatest technical qualities. It is
a quality that cannot be adequately illustrated in single sentences or
detached passages, because its success is not the success of occasional
felicities but of something sustained and pervasive. It may even be
imputed as a fault to Hawthorne that he can never, or almost never,
escape from the equable rhythm of his prose. He seldom ends a story
with the slightly different momentum due to an ending. It is not
merely, however, that his stories end quietly: he is like a rider who
rides beautifully but does not know how to dismount. He maintains his
graceful ease of motion until the last moment, and then he slides off
as best he can.