Wordsworth at Grasmere BOOKS
PATRICK ANDERSON
There can hate been few letter writers more reluctant than William Wordsworth. No sooner did he think of putting pen to paper than his whole body broke into perspiration, his chest became constricted, the nervous affliction in his side and stomach announced its presence with renewed intensity and if, none the less, he persisted in the task, exhaustion and a headache were the usual result. 'Except during absence from my own family I have not written four letters of friendship during the last five years,' he explained to John Wilson. His writing, too, became rapidly illegible. You will perhaps have observed,' he remarked in his first letter to the young De Quincey, 'that the first two or three lines of this sheet are in a tolerably fair, large hand, and now every letter, from A to Z, is in complete rout, one upon the heels of another.' His procrastination struck him as so shameful that he spent no fewer than sixty-seven lines apologising for it in a letter to Sir George Beaumont in 1803, an exercise in self-explanation which must equal in length, if not in colour and humour, the most tortuous of Dylan Thomas's excuses.
Not everyone took his epistolary sufferings at their face value. Charles Lamb, for instance, noticed that Wordsworth had kept a tragedy of his for months without comment and had only broken his silence because he wanted to include the second volume of the Lyrical Ballads, supporting the enclosure with the habitual excuse of 'an almost unsurmountable aversion from Letter-writing.' But when Lamb replied with some criticisms of the poems, The Post did not sleep a moment. I received almost simultaneously a long letter of four sweating pages from my Reluctant Letter-writer . . . with a deal of stuff about a certain Union of Tenderness and Imagination . . . (and a wish) that my range of sensibility was more extended, being obliged to believe that I should receive large influxes of happiness and happy thoughts (I suppose from L.B.).' In this connection one notices the sudden volley of fifteen or sixteen letters to the Bristol firm of Biggs and Cottle when that same second volume was in course of publication in 1800, evidence of the sporadic efficiency of a writer who was both self-centred and a theorist about his art. Naturally enough, he hoped to 'quicken the sale.'
Wordsworth shared his dislike of letter- writing with others of his family, the dilatory Richard, the adored but tongue-tied John, while even Dorothy had her moments of procrastina- tion and her tendency to scrawl. Nevertheless, here is a splendid new edition of William and Dorothy's correspondence between 1787 and 1805, almost 300 letters from youth to early middle age, including fourteen not pub- lished before and twenty-six previously un- collected, the whole covering the period when almost all the great poems were .written and when the little group of family and friends was at its peak of creative domesticity—The Letters• of William and Dorothy Wordsworth : The Early Years 1787-1805. Second edition. Edited by Ernest de Selincourt and revised by Chester L Shaver (out. 90s).
Perhaps a certain ingrowing quality is in- dicated by the fact that, to judge from the material available, for ten years brother and sister had only five correspondents outside the family circle. At first Dorothy holds the field; she writes emotionally to Jane Pollard, often declaring how much she longs for her brothers' company and especially for William's. Although unimpressive at a first meeting, and in person rather plain, William is so amiable and kind, with a 'sort of violence of Affection if I may so Term it': `Ah! Jane! I never thought of the cold when he was with me . . ; It is four years before William makes his appearance in a single message from his hike across the Alps with Jones. Thereafter he corresponds with his friend William Mathews as Dorothy does with Jane. His tone, somewhat stiff and pompous when he questions and advises Mathews (but then he could never be racily at ease like Gray or Byron), has all the same a touch of university sophistication and almost of world- liness.
The hope of a Cambridge fellowship aban- doned, he wonders what will become of him: a curacy, the study of that 'immense wilder- ness,' oriental languages, and then, after his escape to revolutionary France ostensibly to improve his chances as a tutor, some journalistic post perhaps on an Opposition paper (for he disapproves of 'monarchical and aristocratical governments, however modified' and 'cannot in conscience and in principle abet in the smallest degree the measures pursued by the present ministry'), although, when the prospect of their establishing their own magazine crops up, he has to admit, 'I am so poor that I could not advance anything,' besides which he has long felt himself 'doomed to be an idler throughout my whole life.' It is now that he utters the un-Wordsworthian opinion that 'Cataracts and mountains are grand occasional society, but they will not do for constant companions.'
It was the Raisley Calvert legacy which rescued a temperament to whom 'all profes- sions are attended with great inconvenience.' This and the renewed association with Dorothy, who had so long admired from afar, brought them to Racedown in 1795, with Alfoxden, the sojourn in Germany (Hamburg so sad, Goslar so petty and unsociable, the weather so cold) and then an eternity of Grasmere to follow. 'Tomorrow I am going to Bristol to see those two extraordinary young men, Southey and Coleridge,' he wrote from Race- down in November 1795. The cross-fertilisa- tion was beginning.
It is of Grasmere that many of us think, because it was there that the background of character-building mountains and lakes was most characteristic while the middle distance was occupied by independent smallholders or 'statesmen,' picturesque vagrants, beggars and simpletons, and the foreground provided a scene of cottage domesticity at once excessively ordinary and magically irradiated. Poetry was not merely written at Dove Cottage; it grew out of the immediate circumstances, sparkled from person to person, was lived and shared. Dorothy and Mary copied 8,000 lines of William's verse for Coleridge when he went abroad in 1804, doing the work twice over so that they should have an accurate record them- selves. When Dorothy wrote that 'Grasmere was very solemn in the last glimpse of sun- light; it calls home the heart to quietness,' she was describing a 'tranquillity' in which emo- tions were easily reborn.
Thus the lyrics and the narratives: the short poems with their springy, jaunty rhythms and their near-naivete giving the effect of a success- sion of dewdrops rolling down a leaf, some- times maddeningly pert, often miraculously afire; the longer works austere but painfully honest both in general observation and in psychological truth. Meanwhile, in his more personal, autobiographical role, as our home- spun English Proust, William stared down into the stream of time past, discovering what Joyce called epiphanies and he the 'vivifying Virtue' of 'spots of Time,' analysing the finest shades of his response to the mysterious vitality Of the universe, probing what was most authen- tic in his own shadowy nature. 'A frightful deal to say about one's self,' he remarked of the 'poem to Coleridge' (The Prelude) in one letter.
Nothing much happened. 'My life has been unusually barren of events,' William admitted. They were often ill and generally not a little neurotic. Madness and drug-addiction were to haunt their wholesome nests. The weather was bad, the cottage small, the fire smoked, the baby slept in a meat-basket costing half a crown, one of the rooms was papered in news- paper. Both Dorothy and Coleridge nourished hopeless loves; William accused her of 'nervous blubbering' when dear Coleridge went away— and yet her love for her brother was as great. She sighed over an apple into which he had bitten; she took to his bed when he was absent and could not sleep for thoughts of him; they lay together on a fur coat in the orchard or shared a 'trench' near John's Grove, 'he thought that it would be as sweet thus to lie in the grave.' Travelling home after his marriage, it was on Dorothy's bosom- that he laid his head.
Dorothy's Journal crystallises all this, the endless chores, the enormous walks, the irregular timetable, and then 'We left William sitting on the stones, feasting with silence.' It is in the Journal that Dorothy paints the word-pictures which look forward to the exact- ness of Hopkins's descriptions or of those of the Pre-Raphaelites. She notices sheep be- coming transfigured because of the 'glittering silver line on the ridge of the backs, owing to their situation respecting the sun' or the way winds play across lake water, 'Others spread out like a peacock's tail, and some went right forward this way and that in all direc- tions.' Such concreteness is unusual in her brother's poetry.
if the Letters rarely achieve effects like these they have splendid moments such as William's letter to Charles James Fox about the effect of industrialisation on family life, or his plea for the recognition of the true beauty not only of the nightingale but of gorse, owls and idiot boys whose life is 'hidden with God,' or again his ideas on landscape gardening: (By 1805. both brother and sister were beginning to worry about the spoiled appearance of .Gras- mere due to new building.) One cannot miss his genuine concern for Coleridge or his pro- found sorrow at the drowning of his brother John. The egotistical stiffness has passion behind it. And Dorothy rambles delightfully about such matters as the upbringing of little Basil Montagu, the behaviour of the new baby, the awfulness of poor, stupid Mrs Coleridge, and inevitably the planting of runner beans and the baking of bread from a gift of American flour.
One closes the big book, as one ought to do, with a return to the poetry. In Wordsworth's case the rural retreat so endlessly sung during the eighteenth century became absolute and dynamic. The sentimentally mellowed variety and fertility of the Thames Valley was sup- planted by crags and fells, its nymphs and swains by what the poet believed were real people like Michael and the Leech Gatherer. The Recluse was concerned with Nature and Man. Neither of these concepts offers much sustenance nowadays. Nature is an explosion of atoms, a bombardment of cosmic rays, the cruel and wasteful world of parasites and predators, and man moves into it with his hormone pellets and his insecticides, himself the irrational, insecure warmonger of a post- Christian, post-Freudian age. Apart from his psychological insights, what relevance has the shadowy philosophy of Wordsworth to today? It is a sad question but, I think, an important one.
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