I wish I could say it was my diligence that discovered it, and that
I hunted it out of some fifth-rate bookstall of Goswell Street or
of the New Road--‘all this lot at 6d. apiece.’ But no, it has no
romantic story as far as I am concerned. Given perhaps, eighty years
ago, by friend to friend, or lover to sweetheart, in days when our
great-grandmothers were beautiful and our great-grandfathers devoted,
it got to be neglected, it got to be sold--somebody ceased to care for
it, or somebody wanted the few shillings it then would bring--somehow
it tossed about the world, till a keen bookseller or keen bookbuyer
rescued it, and took it to a binder of note, and then it was arrayed
in seemly dress, and safer for the future. Afterwards--but not for
very long, I think--it was a rich man’s possession: one thing, and
quite a little thing, in a great library of English classics, from
Defoe and Sterne to Dickens and Tennyson. Then it came to be sold,
along with most or all of its important companions, and so I got it,
in prosaic fashion. I bought it under the hammer at Sotheby’s--or
rather, Mr. F. S. Ellis bought it there on my behalf--on the 3rd of
March, in this present year of grace. And now it takes up its position
on insignificant shelves, by the side of the Rogers with the Turner
illustrations; by the side of a few things--but the collector knows
them not.
This is how it figures in the auctioneer’s catalogue: ‘Wordsworth (W.)
Lyrical Ballads, with a few other Poems (including Rime of the Ancyent
Marinere by Coleridge), FIRST EDITION, _green morocco extra g. e. by
Riviere_, 1798.’ The ‘g. e.’ means nothing more mysterious than ‘gilt
edges.’ The morocco is of a rich and sunny green--the ‘good’ green of
modern artistic speech, which rightly enough, I suppose, endows colour
and line with moral qualities. I am thankful to the rich man for having
saved me both money and trouble, in binding, completely to my taste, it
happens, my rare book.
And few things, perhaps, deserve more careful guardianship. The
_Lyrical Ballads_, as the world now knows, were a starting-point in
the new English Literature, which addressed itself to study in the
field of Nature more than in academies, and which taught us the beauty
and interest of common life and of everyday incident; and it is a
delight to me to see the pages of these simple lyrics and pastorals as
Wordsworth’s own eye was content with them when Cottle, the Bristol
bookseller, passed them through the press, and printed them, as well
as might be, on pleasantly toned paper, bearing here and there on
its water-mark the date of its making, ‘1795.’ On the whole, it is a
well-printed book; two hundred and ten pages, tastefully arranged, and
of _errata_ there are but five. Those were days when centralisation
had not brought the best work all to London, and even concentrated
it in certain quarters of London; and of what is sometimes called
provincial, but of what there is better reason to define as suburban,
clumsiness--for nothing is done so ill in the world as what is done
in London suburbs--there is only a trace in the gross inequality of
the size of the figures in the table of contents: they are taken, it
appears, from different founts. But generally the book is printed with
smoothness and precision, and, even apart from the high literature
which it enshrines, is worthy of its good green coat, joyful of hue,
pleasant of smell, and grateful of touch to the fingers that pass over
it. And nothing that comes now, even from the Chiswick Press, or from
Jouaust or whoever may be the fashionable printing man to-day in Paris,
can be much neater than its title-page; the mention of which brings me
to a point of interest to the bibliophile.
The book has two title-pages; or, rather, like many of the books of
its day, there belong two title-pages to the same edition of it--the
custom having been for a second bookseller, who bought what the first
bookseller was minded to get rid of, to print his own title-page.
This is the course that the thing followed in the matter of _Lyrical
Ballads_. The book was printed, as we shall see in detail presently,
by Cottle, in Bristol, in the year 1798. Five hundred copies were
printed, but they did not sell. ‘As a curious literary fact,’ says
Cottle, in his ‘Recollections,’ ‘I might mention that the sale of the
First Edition of the _Lyrical Ballads_ was so slow, and the severity
of most of the reviews so great, that its progress to oblivion seemed
ordained to be as rapid as it was certain.’ ‘I had given,’ he adds,
‘thirty guineas for the copyright; but the heavy sale induced me to
part with the largest proportion of the impression of 500, at a loss,
to Mr. Arch, a London bookseller.’ Mr. Arch printed his own title-page.
My copy has his title-page, ‘_London, printed for J. & A. Arch,
Gracechurch Street_’; and so, I think, had the copy sold at Mr. Dew
Smith’s sale, about four years ago. The date, of course, remains the
same, 1798, and all else remains the same. The British Museum copy--it
was Southey’s copy--has the Bristol title-page, and the Museum may
possibly acquire a copy with Mr. Arch’s when opportunity occurs. In
the only copy of the First Edition which they have at present, the
words are, ‘_Bristol, printed by Biggs and Cottle, for T. N. Longman,
Paternoster Row, London_.’ Thus the First Edition of five hundred was
divided--say two hundred for Mr. Cottle, say three hundred for Mr. Arch
when the Bristolian found the sale was ‘slow’ and ‘heavy.’ Where have
they all gone to? It was only eighty-four years ago. But where have all
the copies of the big edition of the _Christmas Carol_ gone to? That
was hardly forty years ago.
To recall a little the origin of the book--the circumstances under
which Wordsworth and Coleridge planned and produced it. It was in the
Nether Stowey and Alfoxden time, when the men were neighbours, three
miles of green Somerset country dividing the home of Coleridge from
the home of Wordsworth. I saw the place--that is, the neighbourhood,
and Coleridge’s home--a few years since, much in that summer weather
which tempted their own more prolonged wanderings, which followed
them in that excursion to ‘Linton and the Valley of Stones,’ which
was the first cause, Wordsworth says, of the issue of _Lyrical
Ballads_. Plain living and high thinking they practised then, and from
necessity as much as from choice. A yeoman of Somerset would hardly
have lived at that time--and certainly he would not live to-day--in
the cottage which was Coleridge’s. Straight from the country road you
step to its door: in an instant you are in the small square parlour,
with large kitchen-like fireplace, with one, or, I think, two small
windows, and a window-seat from which, on days of evil weather, the
stay-at-home commanded the prospect of the passing rustic as he
walked abroad--perhaps of the occasional traveller on his way to the
village inn. But generally, fair weather or foul, the spectacle was
scanty--time was marked by shifting light and changes in the colour
of the sky, or by the movements of beasts at milking-time, or at
hours of rest and of labour. Never, I should say, was one hour merely
frittered away by either the poet who lived or the poet who visited
in that humble cottage. Never a call of ceremony: an interview that
bears no fruit--a social necessity, the continual plague of cities.
Never an hour that did not tell in some way, by active work, or by
‘wise passiveness,’ upon the mind that was to be cultivated and the
character that was to be developed. Such a life, led not in actual
isolation, but in narrowed and selected companionship, was perhaps
about the best preparation men could make for work of the concentrated
and the self-possessed power of the ‘Ancient Mariner,’ and of the
serene profundity of the lines connected with Tintern Abbey. This was
the place, and these were the conditions, for the quietude of life and
thought felt as the greatest necessity of existence by Wordsworth, ‘a
worshipper of Nature,’ ‘unwearied in that service.’
In 1797 came the first thought of the book. Wordsworth’s account of it
may already be familiar. Prefixed in later editions to the poem of ‘We
are Seven,’ which was printed for the first time in _Lyrical Ballads_,
is a note which says: ‘In reference to this poem I will here mention
one of the most noticeable facts in my own poetic history, and that of
Mr. Coleridge.’ And then he tells the story: ‘In the autumn of 1797,
he, my sister, and myself started from Alfoxden pretty late in the
afternoon, with a view to visit Linton and the Valley of Stones near
to it; and, as our united funds were very small, we agreed to defray
the expense of the tour by writing a poem, to be sent to the _New
Monthly Magazine_, set up by Phillips, the bookseller, and edited by
Dr. Aikin. Accordingly, we set off, and proceeded along the Quantock
Hills towards Watchet; and in the course of this walk was planned the
poem of the “Ancient Mariner,” founded on a dream, as Coleridge said,
of his friend Mr. Cruikshank.’ And then Wordsworth adds some details
which are characteristic. ‘Much the greatest part of the story was Mr.
Coleridge’s invention,’ he says; ‘but certain parts I suggested.’
Now, what were those parts? They were parts which yield to no other in
importance, and which do very much to throw over the work the glamour
of noble imagination, the sudden magical charm which was Wordsworth’s
own, and with which he was accustomed to illumine the commoner themes
of his habitual choice. It was Wordsworth’s suggestion that the Ancient
Mariner should be represented as having killed the Albatross, and that
‘the tutelary spirits of these regions’--the regions of the South
Sea--‘should take upon them to avenge the crime.’ ‘I also suggested the
navigation of the ship by the dead men, but do not recollect that I had
anything more to do with the scheme of the poem.’ A detail, however, he
had to do with. ‘I furnished two or three lines at the beginning of
the poem, in particular--
“And listened like a three years’ child:
The Mariner had his will.”
These trifling contributions, all but one, which Mr. C. has with
unnecessary scrupulosity recorded, slipped out of his mind, as they
well might.’
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.
But I think the most interesting of the records is the record of ‘We
are Seven.’ This was composed while walking in the favourite grove.
In Wordsworth’s confession that he composed the last stanza first, we
get at the secret of how entirely the subject had struck him from the
spiritual side.
‘But they are dead; those two are dead!
Their spirits are in heaven!’
’Twas throwing words away, for still
The little maid would have her will,
And said, ‘Nay, we are seven!’
The life of the poem lies in the instinctive thought of immortality,
and in the sense of neighbourhood and close companionship between the
quick and the dead. It is the same thought, the same sense, that throws
its magical light on the tale of Lucy Gray, and permits those last
verses which make the whole thing wonderful, and the common story fine--
Yet some maintain that to this day
She is a living child;
That you may see sweet Lucy Gray
Upon the lonesome wild.
O’er rough and smooth, she trips along
And never looks behind;
And sings a solitary song
That whistles in the wind.
The poem of ‘We are Seven,’ expressing a conception precious to
Wordsworth, yet not expressing it exactly as he would have it
expressed, was, after its first publication, subjected to more changes
than any composition of its length. Of course the direct address to
‘dear brother Jem’--‘A little child, dear brother Jem’--is removed.
Wordsworth only allowed it to stand at first because he relished the
joke of hitching in his friend James Tobin’s name, and this gratuitous
reference to a good fellow, a bad critic, and the brother of the author
of ‘The Honeymoon,’ was promptly suppressed. ‘I sing a song to them,’
is substituted for a line far more effective with the context--‘I sit
and sing to them.’ Another line, beautiful with the context--‘And all
the summer dry’--yields to the line ‘And when the grass was dry.’ But
at one point ‘little Jane’ becomes ‘sister Jane,’ perhaps happily,
and, ‘Quick was the little maid’s reply’ gives the desired sense of
readiness and certainty better than the line it effaces. It is the old
story of careful verbal alterations--some are for the better, some are
for the worse.
More than one of the graver pastoral poems are missing, naturally
enough, to my rare book. I do not find in it that pastoral of
‘Michael,’ which of itself is quite enough, it seems to me, to
ensure to its writer a fame which shall last as long as any judges
of Literature remain--any judges who, caring for style itself, care
supremely for its fit association with the sentiment it is its business
to express. ‘Michael’ is intensely realistic: in the best sense it is
more realistic than anything of Crabbe’s, and the verse that seems
to be halting is but prosaic deliberately. The effect is sought for,
and the effect is gained. The pathos is all the greater because the
elevation of language is so slight and infrequent. When it occurs, it
tells! That poem belongs to the next series of the poet’s works--to
the little collection published first, I think, in 1802, and assuming
to itself the title of _Lyrical Ballads; Volume the Second_. There had
before been no hint of a second, and the first is complete in itself.
I said, just now, in speaking of the ‘We are Seven,’ that Mr. James
Tobin--‘dear brother Jem’--was a bad critic. He showed himself so in
this wise. When _Lyrical Ballads_ was going through the press, it was
Cottle, I suppose, who gave a sight of it to dear brother Jem. He went
to Wordsworth upon that, as one charged with a mission, and who would
not be denied. There was one poem, brother Jem said, in the volume
about to be published, which Wordsworth must cancel. ‘If published,
it will make you everlastingly ridiculous.’ And Wordsworth begged to
know which was the unfortunate piece. He answered, ‘It is called, “We
are Seven.”’--‘Nay,’ said Wordsworth, ‘that shall take its chance,
however.’ For he knew his strength. And another generation has reversed
the judgment which Tobin’s approved.
(_Gentleman’s Magazine_, May 1882.)