Part 3
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.)
BALZAC
Through the ‘usual channels of information’--I mean, of course, the daily papers--many readers have become aware of the recent publication, in the _Revue de Paris_, of a series of Balzac’s letters. But few have understood their importance. Their interest for the student is great, for in a revelation of their author, that is impressive and almost final, they confirm to the full the view of Balzac which those of us have taken (I took it myself in my little _Life_ of him in the ‘Great Writers’ Series) who have perceived that by his temperament and inclination, as well as by his power, he is divided widely from those more sordid and limited realists at whose head it was erewhile the fashion to place him. Romance, it has been claimed--often by friend and foe alike--Romance was Victor Hugo’s, Materialism was Balzac’s. And now Balzac is found--and one has a right to be surprised, not of course at the kind, but only at the degree of the manifestation--he is found in mature years to be in his own conduct more simply and absolutely romantic than the most visionary or most warm-hearted schoolgirl. He works himself into a genuine and indescribably enthusiastic, but always respectful, attachment to a young married woman whom he has never seen, who inquires of him about his stories, who sends him _Thomas à Kempis_ (which he translates later into the _Médecin de Campagne_: ‘c’est l’Evangile en action’), who writes to him confidentially for a year or two before she meets him, who later receives him as her guest in Russian Poland, and whom he marries at last, in 1850, only several years after the death of her husband.
The facts that have been mentioned latest have been known since about the time of the publication of the now familiar couple of volumes of Balzac’s _Correspondence_. It is the earlier and most interesting part of the story that is new. The report had previously been current that Balzac had for the first time been made aware of Madame de Hanska’s existence when he was staying at, or passing through, Neuchâtel, in September 1833. She announced, so it was said, her wish to be introduced to him on hearing that he was at the hotel; and this last autumn (such is the vanity of human effort upon matters after all not profoundly important), I established the fact, in concert with the present proprietor of the Hôtel Belle Vue at Neuchâtel, that the old but not yet disused Hôtel du Faucon must have been the hostelry in which this memorable meeting took place. The ‘Faucon,’ which had been built just in the middle of the little town but a few years before the date of Balzac’s visit, was then the inn at which a traveller of any importance was sure to descend--neither the ‘Belle Vue’ nor the ‘Lac’ existed at that period. Let us take courage, however--our trouble was not so useless as I had for a moment imagined it. The actual meeting-place of two friends, two ‘lovers’ (in Walt Whitman’s sense, at all events), is in the end at least as interesting as the meeting-place of two strangers, who were to warm towards each other only in future years. They met, then, we may fairly presume, at the Faucon at Neuchâtel, but met after a correspondence by turns polite and chivalrous, intimate and ardent.
It was no unusual thing for Balzac--the historian, above all things, of men’s ambitions and of women’s hearts--to receive, together with the compliments, the confessions of the fair. In our own age--an age perhaps more enamoured of physical prowess and presence than of intellectual or spiritual achievement--I have not heard that the novelist or the successful writer of the short story is in constant receipt of the confidences and eulogiums of women. These, I am informed, when bestowed liberally on the stranger, are directed, nowadays, in chief to the _jeune premier_ with a rapid action and a well-made coat. But it was otherwise two generations ago; and Balzac, sometimes complaining of the embarrassment, sometimes, on the other hand, with not a little of honest pride in the circumstances that caused it, avows himself endowed with the functions of a confessor. In the two volumes of the well-known _Correspondence_ I have referred to before, and in such other writings as have hitherto been accessible, it is chiefly question of a certain anonymous ‘Louise,’ whom he never saw, to whom he said many pretty things on writing-paper, and to whom he was once minded to dedicate one of his stories. As a rule, I believe, he left unanswered the letters of the stranger--felt, perhaps, that it was enough that they should have been received, and, if they contained anything that was noteworthy, registered, very likely, in the book of his memory for possible employment in fiction. But now it is made clear abundantly, that in the case of Evelina de Hanska, not only was there correspondence, intimate if scarcely voluminous, before any personal meeting, but likewise that by means of it such a tie was created, such a mutual fascination formed, as could hardly with ease be broken. And yet, what if when they met in the flesh there had been--as after all there might have been--disillusionment! What if Evelina de Hanska had proved as distasteful to Monsieur de Balzac as Anne of Cleves to the experienced Henry!
He was in the best of all possible moods, however, to be impressed with Madame de Hanska, during the period of their earliest correspondence; for unquestionably he was wounded, unquestionably he was sore. Among the friendships--verging sometimes on love-affairs--which Balzac formed with women, two were at this moment in the crisis of their fate. Many years before the existence of Madame de Hanska became known to him, Balzac had been friend, trustful dependant, would-be lover, probably--it is difficult to express the relationship--of a certain Madame de Berny. She was a little older than he was, and she helped him in money troubles when he was young enough to be able to accept her assistance without shame, and she knew the world at a time when, if I may proffer the phrase, he joined the inextinguishable simplicity of the artist to the more prosaic simplicity of the inexperienced.
At Madame de Berny’s house in the Oise, Balzac had written his brief and restrained masterpiece, _Le Curé de Tours_. Her difficult virtue, and all her other qualities and characteristics, made, confessedly, much of the interest of _Le Lys dans la Vallée_. That relationship of theirs--into which, as I consider, a morbid element, an exaggerated sentimentality, did at one time to some extent enter--was only wholly broken by Madame de Berny’s death. For two years at least she was the victim of a mortal illness. The illness began, and the depression caused by it in Balzac began, about 1833.
But during the year 1832, Balzac, whose feeling towards Madame de Berny--‘an angel at my side’--must with long years have somewhat changed its character--during the year 1832 Balzac had passed through an experience the end of which he speaks of, long afterwards, as ‘_un des plus grands chagrins de ma vie_.’ And that was his experience with the young Madame de Castries--the Duchesse de Castries she became, in due time, some years later--a light of Parisian Society, fully as fascinating in the quietude of Aix-les-Bains as amidst the distractions of all the _salons_ of the capital. It is not from the letters that Balzac wrote to her--not, at all events, from any that have been published--that we know or can surmise how irresistible for Balzac was her personal magnetism. It is rather from certain amongst the letters sent by him to his life-long friend, his sister’s school friend, Madame Zulma Carraud of Angoulême, that we are informed of the effect of Madame de Castries’ dealings with him. She was at one time a delight, then a disillusionment, and then (and, as it seems to me, ever afterwards) a painful yet attractive memory. The rupture--never a quarrel avowed to the outsider; never indeed a rupture that was quite complete, or that was in any way explicable save under the supposition that the lady of the _belle chevelure venitienne_ had a blonde’s inconstancy and a Scottish caution--the rupture, such as it was, occurred in the autumn of 1832, when Balzac, who was to have gone over into Italy with the lady and her brother, parted from her at Geneva, and consoled himself (let me be permitted to hope) as best he could, by buying, at that famous dealer’s on the Quai des Bergues,[1] a little of the ‘Carl Théodore’ (Frankenthal) porcelain that his soul loved. The ‘collector,’ I am informed, is heartless--but he has his compensations.
[1] Since moved to the Corratorie.
The second of the just published letters addressed to Madame de Hanska contains sentences which are meaningless, if it is not to Madame de Castries that they refer. ‘Only Heaven and I can ever understand the frightful energy with which a heart must be endowed, if, being full of tears that are repressed, it must suffice still for the labours of writing.’ Again--and this time why should I translate?--the cry of a moment: ‘_Toutes mes passions, toutes mes croyances, sont trompées._’ And he tells his correspondent that Madame Recamier at least never sat, as was supposed, for Feodora.[2] ‘I met a Feodora once, but her I shall never paint; besides, the _Peau de Chagrin_ was written long before I met her.’[3] Yet again, ‘I made Feodora out of two women whom I knew, but not intimately. Observation was enough for me--with a few confidences to boot.’
[2] Feodora, the evil genius, one may say, of the _Peau de Chagrin_.
[3] If this was Madame de Castries, the intention did not always hold good, since more than touches of that charmer there are supposed to be in the _Duchesse de Langeais_.
What Balzac seems to have been struck with, from the first, in Evelina de Hanska, was her sincerity and oneness of purpose, the truth of her devotion to his work, and a certain similarity, an immediate sympathy, between his nature and hers. Much of his work, as he avows, has been done to strike the public--to provide the public with that without which it could scarcely accord him the attention he asked. But ‘certainly there are books in which I have loved to be myself; and you will know well which they are, for they are those in which my heart has spoken.’ When at length the two came together, at Neuchâtel in 1833--as in Vienna, and in Russian Poland itself, in later years--there was nothing, it seems, in either to diminish the interest or to break the spell. And the fascination continued. I have for my own part a little theory that the sympathy of the woman, her deep interest in his work, her participation in it (_Séraphita_ and some kindred labour, whatever be its defects, would never have existed but for that influence of this mystic Northerner), gave the attachment, as far as Balzac was concerned, something of the features of an attachment of consolation. His early adoration, as I hold, his boyish passion, was for Madame de Berny. And, in maturer years, his ideal, his very dream of beauty and of charm, was Madame de Castries--Madame de Castries set, so to put it, in the best of her backgrounds: Madame de Castries at Aix-les-Bains. Never, I think, in Balzac’s life was that experience, or the force of it, equalled. But in Evelina de Hanska, whether as friend or wife, he discovered and obtained a steady rest--a rest the more assured, it may be, because she entertained for him feelings of a deeper devotion than any that were extended by that admirable and almost lifelong comrade, his friend, his sister’s friend, the blameless and the wise Madame Zulma Carraud.