beginning of his collected works, recording a resolution to end
his life among his native hills, was the conclusion of a long poem
written while he was still at school. And, undistinguished as
he was at Cambridge in the contest for academic honours, the
Evening Walk, his first publication, was written during his
vacations.[1] He published it in 1793, to show, as he said, that
he could do something, although he had not distinguished himself
in university work. There are touches here and there of the
bent of imagination that became dominant in him soon
afterwards, notably in the moral aspiration that accompanies his
Remembrance of Collins on the Thames:—
“O glide, fair stream! for ever so
Thy quiet soul on all bestowing,
Till all our minds for ever flow
As thy deep waters now are flowing.”
But in the main this first publication represents the poet in the stage described in the twelfth book of The Prelude:—
“Bent overmuch on superficial things,
Pampering myself with meagre novelties
Of colour and proportion; to the moods
Of time and season, to the moral power,
The affections, and the spirit of the place
Insensible.”
But, though he had not yet found his distinctive aim as a poet, he was inwardly bent upon poetry as “his office upon earth.”
In this determination he was strengthened by his sister Dorothy (q.v.), who with rare devotion consecrated her life henceforward to his service. A timely legacy enabled them to carry their purpose into effect. A friend of his, whom he had nursed in a last illness, Raisley Calvert, son of the steward of the duke of Norfolk, who had large estates in Cumberland, died early in 1795, leaving him a legacy of £900. It may be well to notice how opportunely, as De Quincey half-ruefully remarked, money always fell in to Wordsworth, enabling him to pursue his poetic career without distraction. Calvert's bequest came to him when he was on the point of concluding an engagement as a journalist in London. On it and other small resources he and his sister, thanks to her frugal management, contrived to live for nearly eight years. By the end of that time Lord Lonsdale, who owed Wordsworth's father a large sum for professional services, and had steadily refused to pay it, died, and his successor paid the debt with interest. His wife, Mary Hutchinson, whom he married on the 4th of October 1802, brought him some fortune; and in 1813, when in spite of his plain living his family began to press upon his income, he was appointed stamp-distributor for Westmorland, with an income of £500, afterwards nearly doubled by the increase of his district. In 1842, when he resigned his stamp-distributorship, Sir Robert Peel gave him a Civil List pension of £300.
To return, however, to the course of his life from the time when he resolved to labour with all his powers in the office of poet. The first two years, during which he lived with his self-sacrificing sister at Racedown, in Dorset, were spent in halfhearted and very imperfectly successful experiments, satires in imitation of Juvenal, the tragedy of The Borderers,[2] and a poem in the Spenserian stanza, now entitled Guilt and Sorrow. How much longer this time of self-distrustful endeavour might have continued is a subject for curious speculation, an end was put to it by a fortunate incident, a visit from Coleridge, who had read his first publication, and seen in it, what none of the public critics had discerned, the advent of “an original poetic genius.” Stubborn and independent as Wordsworth was, he needed some friendly voice from the outer world to give him confidence in himself. Coleridge rendered him this indispensable service. He had begun to seek his themes in
“Sorrow, that is not sorrow, but delight;
And miserable love, that is not pain
To hear of, for the glory that redounds
Therefrom to human kind, and what we are.”
He read to his visitor one of these experiments, the story of the ruined cottage, afterwards introduced into the first book of The Excursion.[3] Coleridge, who had already seen original poetic genius in the poems published before, was enthusiastic in his praise of them as having “a character, by books not hitherto reflected.”
June 1797 was the date of this memorable visit. So pleasant was the companionship on both sides that, when Coleridge returned to Nether Stowey, in Somerset, Wordsworth at his instance changed his quarters to Alfoxden, within a mile and a half of Coleridge's temporary residence, and the two poets lived in almost daily intercourse for the next twelve months. During that period Wordsworth's powers rapidly expanded and matured; ideas that had been gathering in his mind for years, and lying there in dim confusion, felt the stir of a new life, and ranged themselves in clearer shapes under the fresh quickening breath of Coleridge's swift and discursive dialectic.
The Lyrical Ballads were the poetic fruits of their companionship. Out of their frequent discussions of the relative value of common life and supernatural incidents as themes for imaginative treatment grew the idea of writing a volume together, composed of poems of the two kinds. Coleridge was to take the supernatural; and, as his industry was not equal to his friend's, this kind was represented by the Ancient Mariner alone. Among Wordsworth's contributions were The Female Vagrant, We are Seven, Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman, The Last of the Flock, The Idiot Boy, The Mad Mother (“Her eyes are wild”), The Thorn, Goody Blake and Harry Gill, The Reverie of Poor Susan, Simon Lee, Expostulation and Reply, The Tables Turned, Lines left upon a Yew-tree Seat, An Old Man Travelling (“Animal Tranquillity and Decay”), Lines above Tintern Abbey. The volume was published by Cottle of Bristol in September 1798.
It is necessary to enumerate the contents of this volume in fairness to the contemporaries of Wordsworth, for their cold or scoffing reception of his first distinctive work. Those Wordsworthians who give up The Idiot Boy,[4] Goody Blake and The Thorn as mistaken experiments have no right to triumph over the first derisive critics of the Lyrical Ballads, or to wonder at the dullness that failed to see at once in this humble issue from an obscure provincial press the advent of a great master in literature. It is true that Tintern Abbey was in the volume, and that all the highest qualities of Wordsworth's imagination and of his verse could be illustrated from the lyrical ballads proper in this first publication; but clear vision is easier for us than it was when the revelation was fragmentary and incomplete.
Although Wordsworth was not received at first with the respect to which he was entitled, his power was not entirely without recognition. There is a curious commercial evidence of this, which ought to be noted, because a perversion of the fact is sometimes used to exaggerate the supposed neglect of Wordsworth at the outset of his career. When the Longmans
- ↑ In The Prelude, book iv., he speaks of himself during his first vacation as “harassed with the toil of verse, much pains and little progress.”
- ↑ Not published till 1842. For the history of this tragedy see Memoirs, vol. i. p. 113; for a sound, if severe, criticism of it, A. C. Swinburne's Miscellanies, p. 118. And yet it was of the blank verse of The Borderers that Coleridge spoke when he wrote to Cottle that “he felt a little man by the side of his friend”.
- ↑ The version read to Coleridge, however, must have been in Spenserian stanzas, if Coleridge was right in his recollection that it was in the same metre with The Female Vagrant, the original title of Guilt and Sorrow.
- ↑ The defect of The Idiot Boy is really rhetorical, rather than poetic. Wordsworth himself said that “he never wrote anything with so much glee,” and, once the source of his glee is felt in the nobly affectionate relations between the two half-witted irrational old women and the glorious imbecile, the work is seen to be executed with a harmony that should satisfy the most exacting criticism. Poetically, therefore, the poem is a success. But rhetorically this particular attempt to “breathe grandeur upon the very humblest face of human life” must be pronounced a failure, inasmuch as the writer did not use sufficiently forcible means to disabuse his readers of vulgar prepossessions.
mind.” The resolution to supply the deficiencies of poetry in the exact description of natural appearances was probably formed while he was in this state of boyish ecstasy at the accidental revelation of his own powers. The date of his beginnings as a poet is confirmed by the lines in The Idiot Boy, written in 1798—
“I to the Muses have been bound
These fourteen years by strong indentures.”
