The Poet's Sister
Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth. Edited by E. de Selincourt. Two vols. (Macmillan. 365.) HERE, gathered together in their entirety for the first time, are the Journals of that lovely and loving creature whose heart was so attuned to the beauties, the happiness and the sorrows around her that she made, tp quote her friend De Quincey, "all that one could tell her reverberate to one's own feelings of the manifest impression that it made on hers. The pulses of light are not more quick or more inevitable in their flow and undulation than were the answering and echoing movements of her sympathising attention."
This attention answered Nature as if it, too, were a voice speaking, talking of its happiness and its grief ; the warmth that comes from these journals is such that the book seems a living being, we hear the pulse the quiet rhythm, like that of a beating heart. For the history of the Journals we must go to the enlightening preface of their editor, Professor de Selincourt. The text of the Journal at Alfoxden, he tells us is given from the text of Professor Knight's selection from the Journals, but with that exception the contents of these two volumes are printed from the manuscripts presented by Mr. Gordon Wordsworth before his death to the Wordsworth Museum at Grasmere.
Profound as is the interest of the other Journals, those written at Alfoxden and Grasmere are, at least to this reader, the most lovely records of that shining life, because, in them nature's daughter moved, loved, suffered and was irradiated by happiness unseen by other eyes.
"Naturally enough" (writes Professor de Selincourt), "when the audience for whom she destined the journal was widened, she severely reduced its personalia. . . . She had herself an abnormal shrinking from publicity, and was anxious, too, in speaking of her fellow-travellers, men already famous, and the subject of irritating and sometimes malicious gossip, not to overstep what she felt to be the bounds of a proper decorum. William's awkwardness in harnessing the horse is cut out; 'poor C. being unwell,' becomes 'Our companion, not in strong health."
But we should enjoy being allowed to sympathise with William's clumsiness and poor C.'s ailment. We would like William's halfmen apple to be left on the dresser and to witness his flight—only just in time—as Miss Simpson that constant caller, knocks at the door. I, for one, would not he deprived of the sight of William, one Sunday morning in March, sitting at breakfast "with his basin of broth and a little plate of bread and butter," writing the poem On a Butterfly.
"He ate not a morsel, nor put on his stockings, but sate with his shirt neckunbuttoned and his waistcoat open while he did it. The thought first came upon him as we were talking about the pleasure we always feel at the sight of a butterfly. I told him that I used to chase them a little, but that I was afraid of brushing the dust off their wings, and did not catch them. (So it was with happiness, a lovely living thing whose beauty must be kept inviolate.) . . . A member of the Simpson family chose that moment to call—but, less successful than the Person from Porlock, he was too late. The poem was finished, the shining dust on the wing remained undimmed."
• Grasmere," Dorothy wrote one day in 1800, "was very solemn so the last glimpse of twilight : it calls home the heart to quietness." But that home whose name was quietness was never dull. "It Was very interesting in the Twilight. I brought home lemon thyme Ind several other plants and planted them by moonlight. I lingered out of doors in the hope of hearing my Brother's tread."
In those earliest years this (in spite of the harassing money worries tO which the household was subject) was the only twilight she knew, until the darkness cast by the change in William's and her friend, Coleridge. "Poor Coleridge, a sad night for such a traveller as he," she wrote, before that long illness took him from them. And in that sentence she might have been slimming up his whole life. Before that time, and leading up to that illness, there was Coleridge's unhappiness. "We broke the seal of Coleridge's letter, and I had light enough to see that he was not ill. I put it in my pocket, but It the top of White Moss I took it to my bosom, a safer place for 11 • . ." And that is all she tells us. We have no right to inquire the full meaning of those words that half hide, half reveal, her suffering.
The twenty years and more that lay between those „early diaries Ind the later ones had dimmed something of the beauty. The
visionary gleam was more fitful, there had been a slow dimming of the bright bird's plume, of the light on the leaves, of the hour of morning.
But although the exquisite creature had grown older, and a little grey, we still enjoy her company. One would be grieved, for instance, to have missed the bearer of a letter of introduction, one Mr. Muloch, who appeared during their tour on the Continent, 1820. We all know Mr. Muloch and have suffered from him. Mr. Muloch was a lecturer, and he lectured William. He did not disguise from William his opinion of Lyrical Ballads, and that he "highly • disapproved of that kind of poetry as childish and silly." "This gentleman's ignorance," wrote Dorothy, "equalled his presumption."
Although Dorothy's companionship is more delightful at home than abroad, we would like to have been with her when Mr. Scott, during a tour made in Scotland, 1803, "sate with us an hour or two and repeated a part of the Lay of the Last Minstrel." One wishes that the impression made upon William had been recorded. All these Journals have the warmth of 'the lovely heart from which they came. And our debt to Professor de Selincourt for giving us
that undying company is profound. EDITH SITWELL.
Previous page
