Part 9 (1/2)
I have said that this book is one of the latest expressions of unadulterated eighteenth-century sentiment. For form's sake, the Diarist mentions now and again, very superficially, Shakespeare, Bacon, and Milton; but in reality, the garden of his study is bounded by a thick hedge behind the statue of Dryden. The cla.s.sics of Greece and Rome, and the limpid reasonable writers of England from the Restoration downwards, these are enough for him. Writing in 1800 he has no suspicion of a new age preparing. We read these stately pages, and we rub our eyes. Can it be that when all this was written, Wordsworth and Coleridge had issued _Lyrical Ballads_, and Keats himself was in the world? Almost the only touch which shows consciousness of a suspicion that romantic literature existed, is a reference to the rival translations of Burger's _Lenore_ in 1797. Sir Walter Scott, as we know, was one of the anonymous translators; it was, however, in all probability not his, but Taylor's, that Green mentions with special approbation.
In one hundred years a mighty change has come over the tastes and fas.h.i.+ons of literary life. When _The Diary of a Lover of Literature_ was written, Dr. Hurd, the pompous and dictatorial Bishop of Worcester, was a dreaded martinet of letters, carrying on the tradition of his yet more formidable master Warburton. As people nowadays discuss Verlaine and Ibsen, so they argued in those days about G.o.dwin and Horne Tooke, and shuddered over each fresh incarnation of Mrs. Radcliffe. Soame Jenyns was dead, indeed, in the flesh, but his influence stalked at nights under the lamps and where disputants were gathered together in country rectories. Dr. Parr affected the Olympian nod, and crowned or checkmated reputations. ”A flattering message from Dr. P----” sends our Diarist into ecstasies so excessive that a reaction sets in, and the ”predominant and final effect upon my mind has been depression rather than elevation.” We think of
_The yarns Jack Hall invented, and the songs Jem Roper sung.
And where are now Jem Roper and Jack Hall?_
Who cares now for Parr's praise or Soame Jenyns' censure? Yet in our Diarist's pages these take equal rank with names that time has spared, with Robertson and Gibbon, Burke and Reynolds.
Thomas Green was more ready for experiment in art than in literature.
He was ”particularly struck” at the Royal Academy of 1797 with a sea view by a painter called Turner:
”Fis.h.i.+ng vessels coming in with a heavy swell in apprehension of a tempest, gathering in the distance, and casting as it advances a night of shade, while a parting glow is spread with fine effect upon the sh.o.r.e; the whole composition bold in design and masterly in execution.
I am entirely unacquainted with the artist, but if he proceeds as he has begun, he cannot fail to become the first in his department.”
A remarkable prophecy, and one of the earliest notices we possess of the effect which the youthful Turner, then but twenty-two years of age, made on his contemporaries.
As a rule, except when he is travelling, our Diarist almost entirely occupies himself with a discussion of the books he happens to be reading. His opinions are not always in concert with the current judgment of to-day; he admires Warburton much more than we do, and Fielding much less. But he never fails to be amusing, because so independent within the restricted bounds of his intellectual domain.
He is shut up in his eighteenth century like a prisoner, but inside its wall his liberty of action is complete. Sometimes his judgments are sensibly in advance of his age. It was the fas.h.i.+on in 1798 to denounce the Letters of Lord Chesterfield as frivolous and immoral.
Green takes a wider view, and in a thoughtful a.n.a.lysis points out their judicious merits and their genuine parental a.s.siduity. When Green can for a moment lift his eyes from his books, he shows a sensitive quality of observation which might have been cultivated to general advantage. Here is a reflection which seems to be as novel as it is happy:
”Looked afterwards into the Roman Catholic Chapel in Duke Street. The thrilling tinkle of the little bell at the elevation of the Host is perhaps the finest example that can be given of the sublime by a.s.sociation--nothing so poor and trivial in itself, nothing so transcendently awful, as indicating the sudden change in the consecrated Elements, and the instant presence of the Redeemer.”
Much of the latter part of the _Diary_, as we hold it, is occupied with the description of a tour in England and Wales. Here Green is lucid, graceful, and refined: producing one after another little vignettes in prose, which remind us of the simple drawings of the water-colour masters of the age, of Girtin or Cozens or Glover. The volume, which opened with some remarks on Sir William Temple, closes with a disquisition on Warton's criticism of the poets. The curtain rises for three years on a smooth stream of intellectual reflection, unruffled by outward incident, and then falls again before we are weary of the monotonous flow of undiluted criticism. _The Diary of a Lover of Literature_ is at once the pleasing record of a cultivated mind, and a monument to a species of existence that is as obsolete as nankeen breeches or a tie-wig.
Isaac D'Israeli said that Green had humbled all modern authors to the dust, and that he earnestly wished for a dozen volumes of _The Diary_.
At Green's death material for at least so many supplements were placed in the hands of John Mitford, who did not venture to produce them.
From January 1834 to May 1843, however, Mitford was incessantly contributing to _The Gentleman's Magazine_ unpublished extracts from this larger _Diary_. These have never been collected, but my friend, Mr. W. Aldis Wright, possesses a very interesting volume, into which the whole ma.s.s of them has been carefully and consecutively pasted, with copious ill.u.s.trative matter, by the hand of Edward FitzGerald, whose interest in and curiosity about Thomas Green were unflagging.
PETER BELL AND HIS TORMENTORS
PETER BELL: _A Tale in Verse, by William Wordsworth. London: Printed by Strahan and Spottiswoode, Printers-Street: for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, Paternoster Row_. 1819.
None of Wordsworth's productions are better known by name than _Peter Bell_, and yet few, probably, are less familiar, even to convinced Wordsworthians. The poet's biographers and critics have commonly s.h.i.+rked the responsibility of discussing this poem, and when the Primrose stanza has been quoted, and the Parlour stanza smiled at, there is usually no more said about _Peter Bell_. A puzzling obscurity hangs around its history. We have no positive knowledge why its publication was so long delayed; nor, having been delayed, why it was at length determined upon. Yet a knowledge of this poem is not merely an important, but, to a thoughtful critic, an essential element in the comprehension of Wordsworth's poetry. No one who examines that body of literature with sympathetic attention should be content to overlook the piece in which Wordsworth's theories are pushed to their furthest extremity.
When _Peter Bell_ was published in April 1819, the author remarked that it had ”nearly survived its _minority_; for it saw the light in the summer of 1798.” It was therefore composed at Alfoxden, that plain stone house in West Somersets.h.i.+re, which Dorothy and William Wordsworth rented for the sum of 23 for one year, the rent covering the use of ”a large park, with seventy head of deer.”
Thanks partly to its remoteness from a railway, and partly also to the peculiarities of its family history, Alfoxden remains singularly unaltered. The lover of Wordsworth who follows its deep umbrageous drive to the point where the house, the park around it, and the Quantocks above them suddenly break upon the view, sees to-day very much what Wordsworth's visitors saw when they trudged up from Stowey to commune with him in 1797. The barrier of ancient beech-trees running up into the moor, Kilve twinkling below, the stretch of fields and woods descending northward to the expanse of the yellow Severn Channel, the plain white facade of Alfoxden itself, with its easy right of way across the fantastic garden, the tumultuous pathway down to the glen, the poet's favourite parlour at the end of the house--all this presents an impression which is probably less transformed, remains more absolutely intact, than any other which can be identified with the early or even the middle life of the poet. That William and Dorothy, in their poverty, should have rented so n.o.ble a country property seems at first sight inexplicable, and the contrast between Alfoxden and Coleridge's squalid pot-house in Nether Stowey can never cease to be astonis.h.i.+ng. But the sole object of the trustees in admitting Wordsworth to Alfoxden was, as Mrs. Sandford has discovered, ”to keep the house inhabited during the minority of the owner;” it was let to the poet on the 14th of July 1797.
It was in this delicious place, under the shadow of ”smooth Quantock's airy ridge,” that Wordsworth's genius came of age. It was during the twelve months spent here that Wordsworth lost the final traces of the old traditional accent of poetry. It was here that the best of the _Lyrical Ballads_ were written, and from this house the first volume of that epoch-making collection was forwarded to the press. Among the poems written at Alfoxden _Peter Bell_ was prominent, but we hear little of it except from Hazlitt, who, taken over to the Wordsworths by Coleridge from Nether Stowey, was on a first visit permitted to read ”the sibylline leaves,” and on a second had the rare pleasure of hearing Wordsworth himself chant _Peter Bell_, in his ”equable, sustained, and internal” manner of recitation, under the ash-trees of Alfoxden Park. I do not know whether it has been noted that the landscape of _Peter Bell_, although localised in Yorks.h.i.+re by the banks of the River Swale, is yet pure Somerset in character. The poem was composed, without a doubt, as the poet tramped the gra.s.sy heights of the Quantock Hills, or descended at headlong pace, mouthing and murmuring as he went, into one sylvan combe after another. To give it its proper place among the writings of the school, we must remember that it belongs to the same group as _Tintern Abbey_ and _The Ancient Mariner_.
Why, then, was it not issued to the world with these? Why was it locked up in the poet's desk for twenty-one years, and shown during that time, as we gather from its author's language to Southey, to few, even of his close friends? To these questions we find no reply vouchsafed, but perhaps it is not difficult to discover one. Every revolutionist in literature or art produces some composition in which he goes further than in any other in his defiance of recognised rules and conventions. It was Wordsworth's central theory that no subject can be too simple and no treatment too naked for poetic purposes. His poems written at Alfoxden are precisely those in which he is most audacious in carrying out his principle, and nothing, even of his, is quite so simple or quite so naked as _Peter Bell_.
Hazlitt, a very young man, strongly prejudiced in favour of the new ideas, has given us a notion of the amazement with which he listened to these pieces of Wordsworth, although he was ”not critically nor sceptically inclined.” Others, we know, were deeply scandalised. I have little doubt that Wordsworth himself considered that, in 1798, his own admirers were scarcely ripe for the publication of _Peter Bell_, while, even so late as June 1812, when Crabb Robinson borrowed the MS. and lent it to Charles Lamb, the latter ”found nothing good in it.” Robinson seems to have been the one admirer of _Peter Bell_ at that time, and he was irritated at Lamb's indifference. Yet his own opinion became modified when the poem was published, and (May 3, 1819) he calls it ”this _unfortunate_ book.”[1] In another place (June 12, 1820) Crabb Robinson says that he implored Wordsworth, before the book was printed, to omit ”the party in a parlour,” and also the banging of the a.s.s's bones, but, of course, in vain.
[Footnote 1: The word _unfortunate_ is omitted by the editor, Thomas Sadler, perhaps in deference to the feelings of Wordsworth's descendants.]