William Wordsworth The Critical Heritage, Volume I 1793 1820

  WILLIAM WORDSWORTH: THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

  Volume I 1793–1820

  

THE CRITICAL HERITAGE SERIES

_{GENERAL EDITOR: B. C. SOUTHAM, M.A., B.LITT. (OXON)}

Formerly Department of English, Westfield College,

University of London

  The Critical Heritage series collects together a large body of criticism on major figures in literature. Each volume presents the contemporary responses to a particular writer, enabling the student to follow the forma- tion of critical attitudes to the writer’s work and its place within a literary tradition. The carefully selected sources range from landmark essays in the history of criticism to fragments of contemporary opinion and little published documentary material, such as letters and diaries. Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included in order to demonstrate fluctuations in reputation following the writer’s death.

  For a list of volumes in the series, see the end of the book.

  

WILLIAM

WORDSWORTH

THE CRIT IC AL HERITAGE

Volume I 1793–1820

  

Edited by

ROBERT WOOF

  

London and New York

  

First published 2001

by Routledge

  

11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge

  

29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

Compilation, introduction, notes © 2001 Robert Woof

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or

reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,

mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter

invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any

information storage or retrieval system, without permission

in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

William Wordsworth / [compiled by] Robert Woof.

p. cm. – (Critical heritage series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Wordsworth, William, 1770–1850 – Criticism and interpretation.

I. Woof, Robert. II. Series.

  

PR5888 .W44 2001

821 ′.7 – dc21 ^00–045941

  ISBN 0–415–03441–8

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.

  

ISBN 0-203-16902-6 Master e-book ISBN

  

ISBN 0-203-26436-3 (Adobe eReader Format)

(Print Edition)

  

General Editor’s Preface

  The reception given to a writer by his contemporaries and near- contemporaries is evidence of considerable value to the student of litera- ture. On the one side we learn a great deal about the state of criticism at large and in particular about the development of critical attitudes towards a single writer; at the same time, through private comments in letters, journals or marginalia, we gain an insight upon the tastes and literary thought of individual readers of the period. Evidence of this kind helps us to understand the writer’s historical situation, the nature of his immediate reading public, and his response to these pressures.

  The separate volumes in the Critical Heritage series present a record of this early criticism. In each volume the documents are headed by an Introduction, discussing the material assembled and relating the early stages of the author’s reception to what we have come to identify as the critical tradition. The volumes make available much material that would otherwise be difficult of access and present-day readers will be in a position to arrive at an informed understanding of the ways in which literature has been read and judged.

  Dr Woof ’s first Wordsworth volume, running from the earliest reviews of 1793 to The River Duddon volume of 1820, treats a vast body of criticism, including journal reviews, satires, parodies and imitations, together with fugitive comments in private letters and journals, some of which material has not been seen in print before.

  The strict chronological arrangement of the material, together with Dr Woof ’s illuminating Introduction and the extensive headnotes, provide us with an invaluable perspective on Wordsworth’s towering presence amongst his contemporaries and enable us to follow the stages of his poetic growth and change over the years.

  BCS

  

Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction with Select Bibliography

  

  Descriptive Sketches and An Evening Walk

   1 dorothy wordsworth, letter, 1793

  

  2 Unsigned review, Analytical Review, 1793

  

  3 Unsigned review, Critical Review, 1793

  

  4 Unsigned review, Critical Review, 1793

  

  5 Unsigned review, European Magazine, 1793

   6 thomas holcroft, Monthly Review, 1793 7 christopher wordsworth, diary, 1793

  

  8 Unsigned notice, English Review, 1793

  

  9 Review signed ‘Peregrinator’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 1794

  

  10 Unsigned notice, New Annual Register 1793, 1794

   11 samuel taylor coleridge, note to poem, 1795/6 12 anna seward, letter, 1798

   13 james plumptre, diary, 1799

   ‘The Birth of Love’

   14 francis wrangham, letter, 1795

   ‘Salisbury Plain’

   15 azariah pinney, letters, 1796 16 charles lamb, letter, 1796

   17 samuel taylor coleridge, letters, 1796–1798

   ‘The Borderers’

   18 samuel taylor coleridge, letters, 1797 19 robert southey, letter, 1797

  

  20 edward ferguson, letter, 1798

   21 elizabeth rawson (née threlkeld), letter, 1798 22 samuel taylor coleridge, letter, 1798 23 william hazlitt, reminiscences, 1798/1823 24 thomasina dennis, letter, 1798 25 charles lloyd, letter, 1798

   ‘Lines Left upon a Seat in a Yew-tree’

   26 charles lamb, letter, 1797 27 thomas wedgwood, letter, 1797 28 elizabeth rawson (née threlkeld), letter, 1799 29 joanna hutchinson, letter, 1799 30 samuel taylor coleridge, letter, 1800 31 james losh, diary, 1798–1801

  

  Lyrical Ballads

   32 christopher wordsworth, letter, 1798 33 charles lamb, letter, 1798 34 thomas denman, letter, 1798 35 robert southey, letter, 1798 36 hannah more, comments recalled by Joseph Cottle,

  1798/1847 37 sara coleridge, letter, 1799 38 francis jeffrey, letter, 1799 39 robert southey, letter, 1799 40 mary spedding, letter, 1799 41 henry crabb robinson, résumé of 1799 42 robert southey, letter, 1800 43 samuel taylor coleridge, letter, 1800

   ‘There was a boy’

   44 samuel taylor coleridge, letter, 1799

   ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’

   45 samuel taylor coleridge, letter, 1799

   CONTENTS

  

CONTENTS

  

  46 Unsigned review, Monthly Mirror, 1798

   47 robert southey, unsigned review, Critical Review, 1798

  

  48 Unsigned review, Analytical Review, 1798

  

  49 Unsigned notice, Monthly Magazine, 1799

  

  50 Unsigned notice, New Annual Register 1798, 1799

  

  51 Unsigned review, New London Review, 1799

   52 charles burney, unsigned review, Monthly Review, 1799

  

  53 Unsigned review, British Critic, 1799

  

  54 Unsigned review, Naval Chronicle, 1799

   54a alexander thomson, The British Parnassus at the Close of

  the Eighteenth Century, 1801

   55 w. heath, unsigned notice, Anti-Jacobin Review, 1800 56 daniel stuart, reviews & comments, Morning Post &

  Courier, 1800

   57 samuel taylor coleridge, letters, 1800–1801 58 charles lloyd, letters, 1801 59 thomas clarkson and catherine clarkson, letters and writings, 1800–1806

   60 john wordsworth, letters, 1801 61 charles lamb, letters, 1801

  63 thomas manning, letters, 1801 65 joanna hutchinson, letter, 1801 67 george bellas greenough, diary, 1801 69 robert southey, letters, 1801–1802 71 dr alexander carlyle, letter, c. 1802 72 richard warner, Tour through the Northern Counties of

  England, 1802

  73 samuel taylor coleridge, letters, 1802

  75 fanny allen, reminiscence by her niece, 1802 77 thomas de quincey, letters, 1803–1804 79 sir george beaumont, letters, 1803–1806 81 francis jeffrey and francis horner, exchange, 1804 83 joseph farington, diary, 1806

  1803, 1804

  99 Unsigned review, Satirist or Monthly Meteor, 1807 100 james montgomery, letter, unsigned review, memoir and reminiscence, 1807–1812

  98 francis jeffrey, unsigned review, Edinburgh Review, 1807

  Magazine, 1807

  97 Unsigned review, Le Beau Monde, or Literary and Fashionable

  96 Unsigned review, Records of Literature, 1807

  95 Unsigned review, Critical Review, 1807

  94 byron, unsigned review, Monthly Literary Recreations, 1807

  

  

  92 ‘T. N.’, essay, Edinburgh Magazine, 1803 93 robert southey (with wordsworth and coleridge), unsigned review of Poems by Peter Bayley, Annual Review

  

  Anti-Jacobin Review, 1803

  91 Unsigned review of Remarks on Scotland by John Stoddart,

  90 daniel stuart, notices, Morning Post, 1803

  Edinburgh Review, 1802

  88 American notices, 1799–1810 89 francis jeffrey, unsigned review of Southey’s Thalaba,

  87 Unsigned notice, Monthly Review, 1802

  86 Unsigned review, Monthly Mirror, 1801

  85 Editorial notice, British Critic, 1801

  84 john stoddart, letter and unsigned review, 1801

  

CONTENTS

  

CONTENTS

  101 lucy aikin, unsigned review, Annual Review, 1807 102 Unsigned review, The Cabinet, or Monthly Review of Polite

  Literature, 1808

  103 francis jeffrey, unsigned review of Crabb’s Poems,

  Edinburgh Review, 1808

  104 Unsigned notice, British Critic, 1809 105 Unsigned notice, Poetical Register and Repository for Fugitive

  Poetry, 1807, 1811

  

  106 walter scott, letters, 1806–1808 108 john taylor coleridge, letters, a review and reminiscences, 1807–1846 109 Wordsworth answers his critics, letters, 1807–1808 111 anna seward, letters, 1807–1808 112 Some painters’ opinions. Diaries, letters and writings,

  1807–1814 113 elizabeth vassal fox, lady holland, journal and letter,

  1807

  115 thomas wilkinson, letter, 1808 117 robert morehead, Poetical Epistle, 1808/1813 119 samuel taylor coleridge, The Friend, 1809–1810

  121 byron, reviews, comments and correspondence, 1807–1814

   123 walter scott, unsigned essay, Edinburgh Annual Register

  for 1808, 1810

  124 john rickman, letter, 1810 126 charles lamb, letter, 1810

  128 henry crabb robinson, diary, 1811–1814 130 Anon., Modern Poets. A Dialogue, in Verse, 1813 132 francis jeffrey, unsigned reviews, Edinburgh Review,

  1811–1812

  134 leigh hunt, writings, 1811–1815 136 j. h. reynolds, letter and The Eden of Imagination, 1814

  

  137 joseph farington, diary, 1809 139 Unsigned review, British Critic, 1809 141 henry crabb robinson, unsigned essay, London Review,

  1809

  143 george canning, remark, 1825

  

  145 Unsigned notice, Variety, 1814 147 william hazlitt, unsigned review, Examinier, 1814 148 francis jeffrey, unsigned review, Edinburgh Review,

  1814

  150 james montgomery, unsigned review, Eclectic Magazine, 1815

   152 john herman merivale, unsigned review, Monthly

  Review, 1815

CONTENTS

  

CONTENTS

  153 john taylor coleridge, unsigned review, British Critic, 1815

   154 Unsigned notice, La Belle Assemblée; or, Bell’s Court and

  Fashionable Magazine, 1815

  155 charles abraham elton, unsigned review, British Review

  and London Critical Jourrnal, 1815

  156 Unsigned review, The Philanthropist or Repository for Hints and

  Suggestions Calculated to Promote the Happiness of Man, 1815

  157 Unsigned notice, Literary Gazette, 1820

  

  158 henry crabb robinson, diary, 1812 160 thomas poole, letter, 1814 162 henry crabb robinson, diary, 1814–1815 164 william taylor, letters, 1814–1815 165 mary shelley and percy bysshe shelley, journal, sonnet and reminiscence, 1814–1816

  167 francis horner, letter, 1815 169 william johnson fox, letter, 1815 171 r. p. gillies, letters, 1815–1816 173 samuel taylor coleridge, letters, 1815 175 priscilla wordsworth, letter, 1815

  

  176 samuel taylor coleridge, letter, 1808 178 john scott, review signed ‘S*’, Champion, 1815

  179 Unsigned review, British Lady’s Magazine, 1815 181 Unsigned review, Augustan Review, 1815 183 bernard barton, letter and poem, 1815 185 Unsigned review, Monthly Review, 1815 187 Unsigned review, Gentleman’s Magazine, 1815 189 rev. william rowe lyall, unsigned review, Quarterly Review,

  1815

  191 Unsigned review, European Magazine, 1816

  

  193 james gray, letter, 1815 195 r. p. gillies, letter, 1816 197 Unsigned review, Scots Magazine and Edinburgh Literary

  Miscellany, 1816

  198 john wilson, letters, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 1817

   198a william hazlitt

  

  199 henry crabb robinson, diary, 1816 201 josiah conder, unsigned review, Eclectic Review, 1816 203 john scott, unsigned review, Champion, 1816 205 Unsigned review, Monthly Review, 1817

  

CONTENTS

  

  ‘Peter Bell’

  207 Unsigned review, Literary Gazette, 1819 209 henry crabb robinson, diary, 1819 211 Review signed ‘J. B.’, European Magazine, 1819 212 Unsigned reviews, Theatrical Inquisitor and Monthly Mirror,

  1819 213 Unsigned review, Literary Chronicle and Weekly Review,

  1819

  215 john taylor coleridge, unsigned review, British Critic, 1819

   217 Review signed ‘H. St. John’, Kaleidoscope, or Literary and

  Scientific Mirror, 1821

  ‘Peter Bell’ and ‘The Waggoner’ 219 Unsigned review, Literary and Statistical Magazine for

  Scotland, 1819

  220 juliet smith, letter, 1819 ‘The Waggoner’

  223 Unsigned review, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 1819 225 Unsigned review, European Magazine, 1819 226 Unsigned review, General Review or Weekly Literary

  Epitome, 1819

  227 Unsigned review, Theatrical Inquisitor and Monthly Mirror, 1819

   229 Unsigned notice, Gentleman’s Magazine, 1819

  

CONTENTS

  230 Unsigned review, Monthly Review, 1819 231 john taylor coleridge, unsigned review, British Critic, 1819

  

  

  232 charles lamb, letter, 1820 234 Unsigned review, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 1820 236 Unsigned review, European Magazine, 1820 237 Unsigned review, Literary Chronicle and Weekly Review,

  1820

  239 Unsigned review, Eclectic Review,1820 240 Unsigned review, Literary and Statistical Magazine for

  Scotland, 1820

  241 Unsigned review, British Review, 1820 243 Unsigned review, Monthly Review, 1820 244 john taylor coleridge, unsigned review, British Critic,

  1821

  

  245 charles lamb, letters, 1815 247 robert southey, letter, 1815 249 thomas wilkinson, letter, 1815 251 mary barker, Lines Addressed to a Noble Lord, 1815 253 john gibson lockhart, letters and essays, 1815–1821 255 thomas noon talfourd, writings, 1815–1835 257 byron, letters and writings, 1815–1821

  

CONTENTS

  

CONTENTS

  258 benjamin robert haydon, letters and diary, 1815–1817 260 john hamilton reynolds, letters and writings,

  1815–1816

  262 james hogg, Poetic Mirror, 1816 264 sarah wedgwood, letter, 1817 266 percy bysshe shelley, letters and writings, 1817–1822

  268 peter george patmore, writings, 1818–1823 270 william howison, writings, 1818 271 robert morehead, ‘Observations on the Poetical

  Character of Dante’, 1818 273 robert southey, letters, 1819 274 Unsigned biographical account, New Monthly Magazine,

  1819

  276 richard henry dana, sr., review of Hazlitt’s Lectures on

  the English Poets, North-American Review, 1819

  277 hans busk, letters, 1819–1820 279 john scott, unsigned review, London Magazine, 1820 281 the etonians: W. M. Praed and H. N. Coleridge,

  Etonian, 1820 Index

  

  

Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank the many librarians over many years who have given me access to their collections, both of periodicals and of archives. The biggest debts are to the British Library and to the Wordsworth Library, but, as will be evident from the sources cited, private owners were always generous. I would like to acknowledge the assistance I received from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and the Leverhulme Trust in making research possible over the years.

  I would like to thank Sally Woodhead for her accurate and thoughtful typing of the text; Peter Regan for encouraging me to think that the book might be a finishable project; Alan Beale for translating and identifying foreign quotations; and my wife, Pamela, who, thirty years ago, thought the project an excellent idea. It is, and always was, her book.

  

Abbreviations and Note on References

  Abbreviations have been kept to a minimum. Whenever possible, full references are given with each of the extracts.

  Wordsworth’s texts are difficult to cite. There has been no complete edition of his poems since the work of Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire in the mid-twentieth century. The admirable Cornell’s

  

Wordsworth, general editor Stephen Parrish, will be the basis of a future

edition.

  After the name of the poem, the reader is referred to the de Selincourt/Darbishire text. Because the revisions are particularly radical in Wordsworth’s early work, such as Lyrical Ballads, 1798 and 1800, and

  Poems 1807, additional references are given to those volumes. LB (1798) & LB (1800)

  Lyrical Ballads: Wordsworth and Coleridge. The text of the 1798 edition with the additional 1800 poems and the Prefaces edited with introduction, notes and appendices, R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (London, Methuen and Co.

  Ltd, 1963).

  

Poems 1807 Wordsworth: Poems in Two Volumes, 1807, ed. Helen

Darbishire (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1914).

PW The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de

  Selincourt, volumes I–V, 1940–9. Second edition (of Vols. I–III), ed. Helen Darbishire, 1952–4).

  

PW, I Volume I, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 1940, revised by

Helen Darbishire, 1952.

PW, II Volume II, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 1944, revised by

Helen Darbishire, 1952.

PW, III Volume III, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 1946, revised by

Helen Darbishire, 1954.

PW, IV Volume IV, ed. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen

Darbishire, 1947.

PW, V Volume V, ed. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen

Darbishire, 1949.

  

Introduction with Select Bibliography

‘He strides on so far before you he dwindles in the distance.’

  This was Coleridge’s explanation for the failure of intelligent men, in this case his patron, Tom Wedgwood, and the Whig and one-time radical, James Mackintosh, to recognise Wordsworth’s power. It was Coleridge who enunciated the principle (one also shared by Words- worth) which later defended Wordsworth from the attacks of his earliest critics: ‘every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great or original, must create the taste by which he is to be relished; he must teach the art by which he is to be seen.’ Much of our understanding of Wordsworth springs from Coleridge, but, perhaps to a surprising extent, it depends also on what Wordsworth himself has told us about his art. His prefaces and essays, his letters, his dictated notes, records of his conversation, his sister Dorothy’s Journals, have all been potent in elucidating the nature of his poetry: of course, intentions are no substitute for great poetry, but if the poet is indeed as great as Wordsworth was, his insights about his own work cannot be ignored.

  Yet it is still a valid question whether or not Wordsworth’s published writings about his verse were a help or a hindrance to the growth of his reputation during his lifetime. The seminal Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1800, has insights which scholars and poets still delight to debate, and Wordsworth himself came to see that it was sometimes difficult for his contemporaries to understand his new emphasis on a poetry that was true to the very nuance of human feelings. About Coleridge’s remark in the Biographia Literaria, 1817, that the theory had been the first object of the critics’ attack and had got in the way of the poetry, he commented wryly:

  

In [the Biographia] there is frequent reference to what is called Mr. W’s theory

& his Preface. I will mention that I never cared a straw about the theory –

& the Preface was written at the request of Mr. Coleridge out of sheer good

nature. I recollect the very spot, a deserted Quarry in the Vale of Grasmere

INTRODUCTION WITH SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  

where he pressed the thing upon me, & but for that it would never have been

thought of.

  (Marginalia in Barron Field’s Memoirs of Wordsworth, 1839, ed. Geoffrey Little, Sidney, 1975, 62)

  There is truth in the notion that some critics did see the Preface as a stick with which to beat the poet – not, one notes, immediately after publica- tion but over the next few years, when it had settled, after revisions in 1802 and 1805, upon its revolutionary foundations. Indeed, there were few immediate reviews of Lyrical Ballads with its Preface (1800); the edition was generally regarded as a re-issue of the 1798 volume, an old publication.

  In these early years there was a special vital audience which nurtured Wordsworth – a fit audience but few – which consisted of his family – Dorothy and Christopher in particular, but also his sailor-brother John with his future wife Mary and her sister Sara Hutchinson adding their voices. There was also Elizabeth Threlkeld, later Elizabeth Rawson, whose letters through fragmentary comments show how the Words- worth cousins were taking a warm interest. And then, outside the immediate family, was the acquired ‘family’ – friends such as the young Pinneys, sons of a Bristol sugar merchant; Francis Wrangham, Words- worth’s co-author in an imitation of Juvenal’s Eighth Satire; Basil Montagu, whose child Wordsworth and Dorothy looked after. By 1797/ 8, the Bristol circle had enlarged to include some who were better known to Coleridge than to Wordsworth – Joseph Cottle, Thomas Poole, James Tobin, John Estlin and James Losh and his clerical friend, Richard Warner, who were settled at Bath, the former suffering from ill health.

  Losh in 1798 lent his fellow Cumbrian his cottage at Shirehampton and not only sent Wordsworth new books but was one of the earliest to listen to Wordsworth reading his new poems aloud. John Thelwall was a more notorious figure, whose retirement to the Wye Valley, by way of a visit to Alfoxden in 1797, simply reminds us of the network of support Words- worth and Coleridge possessed. Thelwall was a weakish poet, and only with exaggeration could he be called a fellow writer: still, his letters written from the Wye Valley in 1798 – (see Towards Tintern Abbey, Grasmere, 1998, 80–2), express sympathies for the teaching power of nature some four months before Wordsworth wrote ‘Tintern Abbey’. Even William Godwin, the radical philosopher in London, thought in 1797 of recommending the two poets to the Wedgwoods as possible _fi researchers for a proposed education project. There were other lively gures – such as Dr Thomas Beddoes and his brilliant young assistant,

INTRODUCTION WITH SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Humphry Davy; Davies Giddy, Cornish MP and patron to both Davy and Thomasina Dennis, the latter a young writer who became govern- ess to the family of the second Josiah Wedgwood; Thomas, Josiah’s philosophically-minded brother; and the Allen family who linked the Wedgwoods and Sir James Mackintosh, since the second Josiah and Mackintosh married sisters. A key London friend was Charles Lamb who, from 1797, became one of those lifetime presences, attentive to Wordsworth’s authorship through the years. A year later the young Hazlitt was to journey to Alfoxden and Nether Stowey from Shrop- shire: he was to brood for seventeen years before publishing the first of his commentaries and a further eight before he published the scintil- lating On My First Acquaintance with Poets in Leigh Hunt’s The Liberal,

  1823. Hazlitt’s future brother-in-law, John Stoddart (the future editor of The Times, ruthlessly satirised as Doctor Slop by William Hone), was a cold-hearted Godwinian rationalist (according to Lamb) who typified one group of reviewers – lawyers who took time off their legal studies to appraise and often roast a poet. Denman, Lockhart, John Taylor Coleridge and the redoubtable Francis Jeffrey were all practising lawyers.

  It was one of those lucky/unlucky chances that Wordsworth per- suaded his London friend, John Stoddart, staying at Grasmere on his way to Scotland (where he was courting Isabella Moncrieff), to review

  

Lyrical Ballads for the British Critic (1802). Stoddart had become (after

  severe initial doubts) somewhat intemperate in his advocacy of his Lake friends, both in print and in conversation, and seems to have irritated a group of young Edinburgh Whigs about to begin a new quarterly, the

  

Edinburgh Review: Francis Jeffrey became their leader, but the circle

included Mackintosh, Sydney Smith and Francis Horner.

  Wordsworth and Coleridge put on the title-page of the 1800 Lyrical

  

Ballads the Latin motto, ‘Quam nihil ad genium, Papiniane, tuum!’,

  which means ‘not exactly to your taste, o lawyers’, and this carried an implicit challenge to the reviewers who were indeed lawyers hoping to gain an extra penny to their often scanty purses. They took on a review of books, often in bulk, rather as if they were taking on a brief. They were cutting, scathing and entertaining. Francis Jeffrey, whose first reaction to the anonymous 1798 Lyrical Ballads was favourable, was, from 1802, to make Wordsworth’s poetry the subject of some powerful attacks. There is a spurious reasonableness and liveliness about Jeffrey’s essays that sweep a reader on, and yet, when Jeffrey was faced with the ‘Ode: Intim- ations of Immortality’, he can only dismiss it in 1807 as ‘the most

INTRODUCTION WITH SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  illegible and unintelligible part of the publication’. And The Excursion in 1814 was received by Jeffrey with a contempt of celebrated proportions: ‘This will never do’; in this way Jeffrey buried in his ironic manner even the small vestiges of praise that he allowed the poem. Two years later his review of The White Doe of Rylstone began,

  

This we think has the merit of being the very worst poem we ever saw imprinted

in a quarto volume.

  Jeffrey fought his way against Wordsworth by means of these essays, and such opening sentences declared the tone. Robert Southey observed that Jeffrey could not spoil the laurels of Wordsworth and Coleridge and himself, though he might mildew their corn. Whatever the effect on Southey’s corn, Wordsworth’s sales were slow, and undoubtedly Jeffrey was in some measure responsible. Southey, the weakest of the three poets, was himself perhaps one whose presence among the Lake poets veiled Wordsworth’s excellence and originality from his readers. Francis Jeffrey found that by attacking the Lake poets as a school, he could sweep all their separate faults together and so tar and ridicule their reputations. Wordsworth and Coleridge in fact were different enough, and Southey was never a serious party to their collaborations. Arguably, Wordsworth never accepted Southey as a major poet, though he did admire him as a good man and as a neighbour. Coleridge thought of Southey as a prose writer, and his late comment in Table-Talk (in manu- script but never published by him) that Southey’s poetry had as much relation to poetry as dumb-bells do to music echoes that undercurrent of distress that both Wordsworth and Coleridge always felt about South- ey’s poetry: even as early as March 1796 Wordsworth declares Southey’s poetry to be the work of a coxcomb.

  But it is not just that Stoddart, by his extravagant praise, poisoned the water between the Lake poets and the Scottish reviewers – he probably had a positive effect and laid the basis for the more favourable appreci- ation that Wordsworth received from Walter Scott. Wordsworth’s friendship with Scott was established by William and Dorothy’s tour to Scotland in the late summer of 1803. Scott is one example of an individual reaction. Much of the commentary that follows comes from domestic or private views and these complement those in the public magazines. Unpublished letters and journals have been searched out; commentary often comes from writers who might, in the first instance, have seen Wordsworth and Coleridge as possible rivals: most of them became admirers. Indeed, most of the truly great writers of

INTRODUCTION WITH SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Wordsworth’s age saw him clearly and saw him whole. Coleridge was the closest – and perhaps significantly, one must apologise that the one great work that is not included in these volumes is Coleridge’s

  

Biographia Literaria, 1817; this is the most systematic appreciation of

  Wordsworth’s work, setting it in the context of Coleridge’s own difficult philosophical move from Locke to the German transcendentalists; Wordsworth was presented in the Biographia as one who showed the organic power of the faculty of the Imagination; and Wordsworth’s position is not the less enhanced by his being placed beside only one other poet, and that is Shakespeare. Although Wordsworth’s defects are acknowledged, his quintessential originality is insisted upon. The impact of Coleridge’s commentary can be detected in the increasing interest within the universities – William Whewell, for instance, the future Master of Trinity, was forced to reconsider Wordsworth’s poetry in the light of Coleridge’s remarks. Again, Coleridge’s impact comes through members of his family, such as his nephew, the lawyer John Taylor Coleridge, and later his brilliant daughter, Sara, who was to take up her father’s torch and place Wordsworth’s pre-eminence before the reader.

  Interestingly, what both Wordsworth and Coleridge especially seemed to fear was the parodist and the satirist. They were aware of the impact that William Gifford’s sniping Baviad had had in the 1790s. When Peter Bayley published in 1803 some fairly modest parodies, the poets took extreme action to try to get him attacked in the press. Parodists and satirists were, from time to time, to produce, and even orchestrate, wintry responses to Wordsworth. Clearly, some of it derived from Jeffrey’s mocking superiority, which can seem to be an attitude rather than an argument; in truth, Jeffrey’s argument from decorum had a sociological basis in that he felt that Wordsworth took up unsuitable subjects for one who had aspiration to be a great poet. Jeffrey could not stand the new sympathy for the weak, the poor, the oppressed; not for him the revo- lutionary and democratic idea that Wordsworth expressed in his letter to Charles James Fox, January 1801, when he declared that he wanted to show that ‘men who do not wear fine cloaths can feel deeply’. Jeffrey’s attitude was to lead to Byron’s English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1808)

• – a work in which Byron took up the same cudgels, not because he had read Wordsworth closely, but because it was more fun to imitate Jeffrey’s and Gifford’s bravado attacks. Byron’s style here is that of an irritated superiority, touched by a sense of aristocracy, and has few fine percep- tions. Byron was aware of the opinions of his radical acquaintance, Leigh Hunt, whose Feast of Poets (first published in 1811 but frequently

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  revised), presented Wordsworth and his friends scornfully expelled from the Feast by Apollo himself. However, part of the turbulence that Wordsworth caused in critical circles is illustrated by Hunt’s being forced to see Wordsworth for himself, rather than through the window of Jeffrey’s mind. Thomas Barnes, the great and future editor of The

  

Times, had instructed Hunt (while the latter was in gaol for libelling the

  Prince Regent) on Wordsworth’s excellencies; thereafter, Hunt spoke more appreciatively of Wordsworth in successive editions of The Feast

  

of Poets, 1814 and 1815. Hunt progressively revised his poem until

  Wordsworth was not only accepted but elevated – to Byron’s disgust – to be ‘the prince of the bards of his time’. Byron became himself the true heir to Jeffrey’s tradition, so that he not only attacked Wordsworth in imitation of Jeffrey, but brought into play his own sense of the absurdity of the Lake poets’ claims. As well as pointing out that Coleridge had taught metaphysics to the nation, and wishing that he would ‘explain his explanation’, Byron fell upon Wordsworth’s Excursion:

  

Wordsworth’s last quarto, by the way, is bigger

Than any since the birthday of typography;

A drowsy frowzy poem called the ‘Excursion,’

Writ in a manner which is my aversion.

  (Don Juan, III, 845–8)

  But, as Macaulay observed, ‘though always sneering at Mr Wordsworth, he [Byron] was yet, though perhaps unconsciously, the interpreter between Mr Wordsworth and the multitude. . . . What Mr Wordsworth had said like a recluse, Lord Byron said like a man of the world.’ Cer- tainly parts of the popular Childe Harold, III (1816), were a direct result of Shelley’s persuading Byron to read Wordsworth for himself; it was a temporary phase for Byron, but many readers notice the ‘plagiarisms’ from Wordsworth – low-keyed and inadequately explored as some of them are. Byron may have stolen his enemy’s clothes and, having tried them on, decided to reject them, but his very concern with Wordsworth, even to attack him, seems to have done Wordsworth no harm.

  Wordsworth knew that the attackers, the parodists and the plagiarists could be useful as well as dangerous. There must have been some core of significant truth in Wordsworth’s news and advice in 1817 to his friend Samuel Rogers: ‘Why don’t you hire somebody to abuse you? . . . For myself, I begin to fear that I should soon be forgotten if it were not for my enemies’. Whether Wordsworth was exactly pleased that he should be attacked anonymously by John Hamilton Reynolds with his witty

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  ‘Peter Bell: A Lyrical Ballad’, in 1819, is not recorded. But Reynolds was one who, some five years before, had sought Wordsworth’s approval by sending him his poems; he had received Wordsworth’s sensible criti- cisms with disappointment, and turned his real understanding of the poet to comic effect. In this he resembles James Hogg, whose Poetic

  

Mirror (1816) provides blank-verse tales written in the manner of The

Excursion: the parodia, or imitation, is so good that the necessary bathos

  for comic effect is extraordinarily minimal. Shelley’s Peter Bell the Third (1819), posthumously published in 1839, is more an essay on the poet than a parody of the poem (which Shelley in Italy had only read about in Leigh Hunt’s review in the Examiner).

  All the controversy about Wordsworth’s theories and his supposed application of them had sparked off a great critical debate; and the impressive thing about the criticism of Wordsworth in his own lifetime, despite the many baffled responses, is the way that the major writers rose to the challenge he presented.

  Coleridge, as we have noted, was the greatest to illuminate his con- temporaries about Wordsworth’s powers: his Biographia (1817) is a treatment not only of himself but also of the nature of poetry and of Wordsworth’s work as an illustration of that theory. More, and this we are able to show in the following pages, in his letters and conversations, Coleridge worked like a secret agent to further Wordsworth’s fame. And so, too, did others, though on a different intellectual level. Lady Beaumont, the blue-stocking wife of the painter, Sir George, could embarrass her husband (and the poet) with her fervent advocacy. Henry Crabb Robinson, indefatigable diarist, though he published little, minis- tered remarkably to Wordsworth’s cause; in coach or in drawing-room, in London, the provinces or in Germany, he would draw out a copy of the poems and read aloud. Charles Lamb published a favourable review of The Excursion in the Quarterly Review of 1814 (alas, sadly mutilated by the editor) but he also constantly recorded a bold and detailed response to Wordsworth in his letters. William Hazlitt stands out as one of the most interesting of Wordsworth’s public advocates. He shared with Hunt (and Byron and Shelley) an aversion to Wordsworth’s later politics and had little liking for him as a man. And yet, throughout Hazlitt’s writing, there is a shrewd apprehension of the great Wordsworth, warts and all:

  

He sees nothing loftier than human hopes; nothing deeper than the human

heart. This he probes, this he tampers with, this he poises with all its incalculable

weight of thought and feeling, in his hands; and at the same time calms the

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throbbing pulses of his own heart, by keeping his eye ever fixed on the face

of nature.

  (from The Spirit of the Age, 1825)

  So, armed with instinct, commonsense and a certain hostility, Hazlitt teases out the significance of Wordsworth, and if there is no point of rest in Hazlitt’s thinking, it is because Wordsworth cannot be dismissed or categorised; there is no magic, as Rumpelstiltskin discovered, when a thing can be precisely named. Hazlitt’s criticisms were to fall on the receptive ears of John Keats: but Keats’s intelligence is sufficiently inde- pendent and his commentary is part of a larger concern with his poetical identity. But for all the creative writers – Lamb, Walter Scott, De Quincey, Shelley, Keats, even Clare, the late Blake and the early Tennyson

• – Wordsworth had become one of those mountains which had to be climbed because it became increasingly impossible to go round him. This was even to be the situation of lesser poets who might be described as literary journalists: the fair-minded non-conformist James Montgomery, who was both a reviewer and a rhetorical verse-writer, and, again, the more talented but, to Wordsworth, the unreliable figure of Leigh Hunt.

  There was enough written on Wordsworth’s behalf during his own lifetime to fill several feet of library shelves. Leisurely articles, long and often anonymous, appeared in periodicals by such minor writers as John Scott, the editor of the Champion and the London Magazine; Thomas Noon Talfourd, lawyer and poet; Thomas de Quincey and John Wilson (from 1820 Professor of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh University), not to mention the growing fullness of American admiration – the painter Washington Allston, the Unitarian W. E. Channing, the young Harvard professor George Ticknor, prelude to editors such as Henry Reed; another powerful voice, as yet confined to a personal journal, was Emerson’s, who had aspirations to be a great poet. It was this massing of many recognitions that led, eventually, to Wordsworth’s becoming Poet Laureate in 1843 on the death of his neighbour, Robert Southey. The enterprising new University of Durham had, in 1838, noted that he was in the area and promptly gave him his first Honorary Doctorate, but it was one year later, on 12 June 1839, at a great reception at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford, when Isabella Fenwick, the friend of his later years, and the recorder of all his own notes on his poems in the 1840s, recorded in her letters:

  

No such acclamations had been heard excepting on the appearance of the Duke

of Wellington – these however did not much move him – but when the public

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Orator spoke of him as the Poet of humanity – and as having through the power

of love & genius – made us feel as nothing the artificial distinctions which

separate the different classes of society and that ‘we have all one common heart’ –

then he felt understood & recognised – & was thankful.