MY RARE BOOK
I wishI 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 withmost 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. TheLyrical Ballads, as the world now knows, were a starting-point in the new English Literature, which addressed itself to study in the fieldof 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 oferratathere 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 comesnow, 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 ofLyrical 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 theLyrical Balladswas 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 theChristmas Carolgone 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 ofLyrical 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 ofcities. 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 inLyrical 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 defraythe expense of the tour by writing a poem, to be sent to theNew 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 furnishedtwo or three lines at the beginning of the poem, inparticular—
“And listened like a three years’ child:The Mariner had his will.”
“And listened like a three years’ child:The Mariner had his will.”
“And listened like a three years’ child:The Mariner had his will.”
“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 toPoems 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 theBiographia 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 thefriends 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 thevolumes 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 ofLyrical 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 theLyrical Balladswas 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’sLifethat as late as September the 13th the book was ‘printed, not published.’ Some weeks before, Wordsworthand his sister took up temporary abode in Bristol, that they might be near the printer. Then, at length, in the early part of autumn, theLyrical Balladsappeared, and Wordsworth and his sister, and Coleridge, left England for Germany.
To the first edition ofLyrical Balladsis 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 willnot 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 theBiographia Literariathat, 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 interpolationof 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 theLyrical Balladsdoes 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 contributionsto 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 theLyrical 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 favouriteamong 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.
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,Truth breathed by cheerfulness.
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,Truth breathed by cheerfulness.
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 stillThe little maid would have her will,And said, ‘Nay, we are seven!’
‘But they are dead; those two are dead!Their spirits are in heaven!’’Twas throwing words away, for stillThe little maid would have her will,And said, ‘Nay, we are seven!’
‘But they are dead; those two are dead!Their spirits are in heaven!’’Twas throwing words away, for stillThe little maid would have her will,And said, ‘Nay, we are seven!’
‘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 storyfine—
Yet some maintain that to this dayShe is a living child;That you may see sweet Lucy GrayUpon the lonesome wild.O’er rough and smooth, she trips alongAnd never looks behind;And sings a solitary songThat whistles in the wind.
Yet some maintain that to this dayShe is a living child;That you may see sweet Lucy GrayUpon the lonesome wild.O’er rough and smooth, she trips alongAnd never looks behind;And sings a solitary songThat whistles in the wind.
Yet some maintain that to this dayShe is a living child;That you may see sweet Lucy GrayUpon the lonesome wild.O’er rough and smooth, she trips alongAnd never looks behind;And sings a solitary songThat whistles in the wind.
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’sreply’ 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 ofLyrical 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 abad critic. He showed himself so in this wise. WhenLyrical Balladswas 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.)