MRS COLERIDGE didn’t go to Germany. She was dropped from the party at the last moment, though Coleridge set off with William and Dorothy, half promising to send for his wife and the two children later on, when he’d got settled. Instead, a local friend of Coleridge’s from Stowey, John Chester, made up the foursome.
‘Chester was ill the whole time,’ wrote Coleridge about the voyage in his notebook. ‘Wordsworth was shockingly ill! Miss Wordsworth worst of all—vomiting and groaning and crying the whole time—and I neither sick nor giddy but gay as a lark.’ And that’s roughly how it all went during the whole of their German adventure.
The Wordsworths had very little money, and, before leaving, they tried to sell William’s copy of Gilpin’s Guide to the Lake District—a treasured possession, as William loved all travel books. Even so, the Wedgwoods had to advance them a loan of £110 so that they could go at all. Coleridge, on the other hand, now had his Wedgwood annuity and was able to enjoy every minute of his stay in Germany, getting himself lots of invitations and throwing himself fully into German life. One of the attractions of Germany for English people was that they could roam anywhere in that country in safety, whereas most of the rest of Europe was being overrun by Napoleon.
The English Channel being too dangerous because of the war, they sailed from Yarmouth to Hamburg, where they all spent a few days, meeting some local poets, being upset by the bad smells, looking at the sights and wondering in amazement at a street full of prostitutes (already a great attraction for all visitors to Hamburg). Then Coleridge and Wordsworth separated. It seems a strange decision, but as the relevant letters have disappeared, the reasons can only be guessed at. It could be that they thought they would learn more German by separating. Together, they would be speaking English all the time. Perhaps they just wanted to see different places. Anyway, Coleridge and his friend went off to the university town of Ratzeburg, where they had letters of introduction, while the Wordsworths moved a bit further south to the small town of Goslar, near Hanover, not far from the present East German border.
Goslar was an old imperial town, where the royal courts had once been held, and was supposed to have romantic associations and be very pretty, situated right on the edge of the Hartz Mountains. William and Dorothy found it decidedly unromantic, unbearably cold, very dull, very cheerless. They wanted to live with a German family and take part in local life, but could find only a lodging-house where they were ill fed, ignored and lacked any books, as there turned out to be no library in the town. There’s one remark in passing by Dorothy, describing how she ‘carried Kubla to a fountain where I drank some excellent water’, which shows that some sense of humour (Kubla Khan=water can) was retained, despite all the disappointments.
Most of the time, they were exceedingly poor and one of William’s constant worries was that innkeepers and shopkeepers were just waiting to cheat him, a feeling which he always had when travelling abroad. They were in fact too poor to be worth cheating. On one occasion, when they’d been wandering the German countryside, they were taken for vagrants and Dorothy was arrested and put inside a tower at the gates of a town, till William returned and was able to prove their identity. In general, their life in Germany seems to have been totally isolated. ‘My hope was that I should be able to learn German as I learn’d French,’ wrote William. ‘In this I have been woefully deceived. I acquired more French in two months than I should acquire German in five years living as we have lived.’ Of course, in France he had enjoyed the advantage of living en famille.
Coleridge, meanwhile, was amongst the nobs, dining out with counts and countesses, jabbering away in German, having a good time. He was in correspondence with the Wordsworths, and so he soon knew how badly William was faring. ‘He might as well have been in England as at Goslar, in the situation which he chose and with his unseeking manners. His taking his sister with him was a wrong step.… Sister here is considered as only a name for mistress. Still, male acquaintances he might have had, and had I been at Goslar I would have had them; but W, God love him! seems to have lost his spirits and almost his inclination for it.’
Dorothy herself realized she might be a handicap to William—not because people might think she was his mistress, or because she put off potential girl friends for him, but because, as a single person, William might have got more invitations. ‘There is no society at Goslar, it is a lifeless town and it seems that here in Germany a man travelling alone may do very well but if his wife or sister goes with him, he must give entertainments. So we content ourselves with reading German … plenty of dry walks. William is very industrious; his mind is always active, indeed too much so; he overwearies himself and suffers from pain and weakness in the side.’
William’s pain in the side was a familiar symptom, indicating that he was working hard, usually revising. It is difficult to know whether he imagined the pain or not, as it never led to any serious illness, but once he started on the poetry, his side started hurting. Coleridge suspected it was hypochondria. We are, incidentally, well supplied with copious information about their little ailments from now on, as Dorothy had begun a daily journal in Alfoxden, which she continued for a short time in Germany, though her letters anyway always gave the latest details of the state of their bowels, as well as headaches and assorted pains in the side. Blinding headaches were Dorothy’s speciality: and they were often so bad that she had to lie down.
Starved of books to read, William decided to write his own, and these four months in Germany were an enormously active and fertile time for him. Going to a foreign country made him write about his native land—about the Lake District, his school-days, his childhood memories. It is a common reaction. You realize what you had, once you’ve left it.
The poems about Lucy are perhaps Wordsworth’s best-known work which he did in Germany, along with ‘Nutting’ and the Matthew poems, but the most important work was the beginning of The Prelude. He was stuck in that freezing cold lodging-house, forced to wear an overcoat constantly to keep warm, with no friends and no social or intellectual contacts, apart from Dorothy. It was 1799, the last year of the century. His thirtieth birthday was in the offing. It seemed a good time to take stock. Coleridge had suggested some time before that he should write a philosophical poem, and so William started writing it for Coleridge, addressing it to him personally.
Dorothy also appears a lot in the other poems he started writing in Germany and she is often thought to have been an element in the origin of Lucy. ‘Strange fits of passion have I known’ and ‘She dwelt among the untrodden ways’ were both written in this year. Strange stuff to write about your sister, but the Lucy figure in the end dies, which is equally bizarre. Perhaps Lucy was part-based on some unknown girl who had died. One possible friend (who had died three years earlier, in 1796) was Mary Hutchinson’s sister, Margaret, a friend from the Penrith days. Literary scholars are still turning over these Lucy poems, looking for clues, tracking down the influences.
William and Dorothy left Goslar in February 1799, heading for England. Germany had proved excellent for work, if dreary for their personal life; but while William was there he at last decided where he would like to live. He wanted to go back to the north of England, preferably the Lake District.
Lyrical Ballads had come out while William was away, but there was no crowd of worshippers at Yarmouth quayside to greet them on their return from Germany, no gentlemen with green eye-shades from the Morning Post, eager for some suitable comment.
Joseph Cottle, their young Bristol bookseller, born in 1770, the same year as William, was the publisher of the first works of Southey, Coleridge and Wordsworth, a distinction which in later years he managed to boast about, though at the time it ruined him as a publisher. As far as he was concerned, Lyrical Ballads was a failure. At first, he wrote vaguely hopeful notes to William, giving no details, but saying things looked encouraging, and William wrote back, demanding to know exactly how many copies had been sold. In the end, Cottle had to admit that he had already remaindered most of the five hundred copies which he’d published: ‘The sale was so slow and the severity of most of the reviews so great, that its progress to oblivion … seemed ordained. I parted with the greatest proportion of the 500, at a loss, to Mr Arch, a London bookseller.’
Cottle then ceased publishing and transferred all his copyrights in the books he’d published to Longmans. The value of the copyright of Lyrical Ballads was assessed as nil. When William heard this, he asked Cottle to recover the copyright and transfer it to him and Coleridge, which Cottle did.
Three reviews had appeared after publication, all of them poor; it was probably the earliest, which was very critical, that caused Cottle to sell out. This review was by Southey, of all people; but then Coleridge had fallen out with him and Wordsworth had been rather horrid about him and his Joan of Arc. Southey thought that the poems had failed, ‘not because the language of conversation is little adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure, but because it has been tried upon uninteresting subjects’. He was particularly harsh about Coleridge’s ‘Ancient Mariner’, calling it absurd and unintelligible.
William wrote to Cottle:
Southey’s review I have seen. He knew that I published those poems for money and money alone. He knew that money was of importance to me. If he could not conscientously have spoken differently of the volume, he ought to have declined the task of reviewing it.
The bulk of the poems he has described as destitute of merit. Am I recompensed for this by vague praises of my talent? I care little for the praise of any other professional critics, but as it may help me to pudding. Believe me, dear Cottle, your affectionate friend, W. Wordsworth.
The big thing, the particularly original thing, about Lyrical Ballads was their conversational style and content, at least by the standards of the day. All the poems weren’t like this, but those that were, by contemporary standards, were considered either aggressively modernistic or brutally banal. Wordsworth and Coleridge, as William outlined in a foreword note, were attempting to do two things: firstly, to write poems about nature, emphasizing the romantic and the imaginative; secondly, to write about ‘matter-of-fact’ subjects. William later added a lengthier preface, expounding rather didactically, almost coxcombly his views and aims as a poet, elaborating on his theme that the convention of poetry of the time bore no relation to the real languge of men. He explained that the poems were meant to be experiments, and so the reader had to expect to be shocked by a certain awkwardness: ‘Readers of superior judgment may disapprove of the style in which many of the pieces are executed. It will perhaps appear to them that the author has sometimes descended too low and that many of his expressions are too familiar, and not of sufficient dignity.’
It is hard today for the layman to see how the poems could in any way be called experimental, or even shocking. They appear, in the main, to be simple rustic poems, some of them little more than doggerel; but it has to be realized that eighteenth-century conventions were very rigid. Language was flowery, the form was strictly metric, there was a heavy Classical influence and the subject-matter was meant to be equally Classical and flowery. Reviewers admired perfect hexameters or iambic pentameters. Birds were ‘feathered songsters’. It is true that poets like Burns were writing about ordinary subjects, but usually as regional poets, writing in a dialect. Educated gentlemen like Wordsworth were meant to follow the literary rules. Wordsworth had indeed read and admired the accepted eighteenth-century poets, but now, so some critics thought, he was slumming and deliberately letting down the side. As in so many other matters, he had decided to revolt, throwing the accepted standards over in order to go his own way.
It has to be understood what Wordsworth, and many young men like him, had been going through in the last decade. The French Revolution had had a profound effect on all aspects of life and thought. In his own little revolution, Wordsworth was not only reacting against the eighteenth-century style of poetry, with all its embellishments and rules, but against the eighteenth-century intellectual obsessions, such as the cult of Reason. Even people like Godwin, whose philosophical teaching he’d now rejected, put the intellect first, denying the power of the senses and emotions. Wordsworth, in his revolt, was deliberately writing about people with no intellect, no knowledge of classical logic—in fact, in many cases about people with no reason at all, being stark, raving mad.
To find poems in Lyrical Ballads called ‘The Idiot Boy’, ‘The Mad Mother’ or ‘The Female Vagrant’ was indeed shocking to people of superior tastes. One just didn’t write about village imbeciles or deranged women. Pedlars and shepherds could conceivably be written about, but they had to be idealized and romanticized. One didn’t want some old shepherd blathering on in a conversational style about how he’d lost his flock and ended up with one dead lamb, as Wordsworth did. Poetry should be written by an educated elite, for an educated elite. It had no connection with folk ballads, passed on by peasants by word of mouth and most of which were either very rude, in every sense, or simply meant to be humorous. Wordsworth, without being humorous or saucy, was taking rustic subjects and trying to get the educated people to read about them. He never wrote in dialect. He didn’t in fact write for ordinary people, which is ironic, considering he thought he was writing about ordinary subjects. The ordinary people, whoever they are, never read his poems, and still don’t. He is the poet of the Lake District, but you don’t find Lake District shepherds reading his stuff. Wordsworth, despite his experiments, was still hoping to be read by the traditional, poetry-reading, educated public.
Naturally enough, most educated people were put off by Wordsworth’s rustic topics, which are certainly very easy to ridicule, and only slowly did they get round to realizing that it was his reactions to such topics or such people that was new and interesting. That was where his message lay. He was leading readers to see a wisdom and a morality in ordinary people and in ordinary, natural things that had been dismissed and ignored, not just in poetry but in life, by the so-called superior people. Often, when the message as well as the medium is very simple, then the result can appear totally simplistic, not to say pointless. It is always easier to hide behind complications, to cover yourself in style. Doing or saying the simple thing leaves you open to groans and heavy sighs, or, as happened with Wordsworth in many quarters, to laughter and ridicule.
The most ridiculed passage has usually been from the poem ‘The Thorn’, where Wordsworth did take his matter-of-fact style to extremes, writing more like a surveyor than a poet:
And to the left, three yards beyond
You see a little muddy pond
Of water—never dry,
I’ve measured it from side to side
’Tis three feet long, and two feet wide.
‘The Idiot Boy’ was also much abused, for its subject-matter and style:
’Tis eight o’clock—a clear March night,
The moon is up,—the sky is blue,
The owlet, in the moonlight air,
Shouts from nobody knows where;
He lengthens out his lonely shout,
Halloo! halloo! a long halloo!
One of the simplest poems in Lyrical Ballads is called ‘We are seven’, in which the poet meets a little girl and asks her how many brothers and sisters she has. It turns out there are five living, and two buried in the churchyard, but she still insists ‘we are seven’. That’s about all there is to it. No wonder people scoffed at the banality of the subject—and the style is no better.
I met a little cottage girl:
She was eight years old, she said;
Her hair was thick with many a curl
That clustered round her head.
It could be a nursery rhyme, or a poem written by a child of eight, but there’s a certain haunting beauty in its simplicity and starkness—at least, I think there is, having read it a few times, at first preparing to scoff.
William wrote this poem at Alfoxden, walking up and down in a little wood outside the house, remembering a conversation he’d had a few years earlier with a little girl while walking up the Wye valley. Coleridge and Dorothy were waiting inside for him, with the tea all set, but William, who’d composed the last lines first, couldn’t think of an opening stanza.
‘When it was all finished,’ William later recalled, ‘I came in and recited it to Mr Coleridge and my Sister and said “A prefatory stanza must be added and I should sit down to our little tea meal with greater pleasure if my task were finished.” I mentioned in substance what I wished to be expressed and Coleridge immediately threw off the stanza.…’
Not all the poems were as simple as that—notably ‘Expostulation and Reply’ and ‘The Tables Turned’. They were the ones written at Alfoxden, based on conversations which had taken place between William and young William Hazlitt, then only nineteen years old. He had heard Coleridge lecture at Shrewsbury the previous year—he had walked ten miles through mud to get there—and got himself invited to Coleridge’s cottage. ‘I got into a metaphysical argument with Wordsworth,’ wrote Hazlitt, ‘while Coleridge was explaining the different notes of the nightingale to his sister, in which we neither of us succeeded in making ourselves perfectly clear and intelligible.’
Hazlitt had a highly developed critical brain, even at nineteen, and he later held some strong opinions on Wordsworth, but he remembered ever afterwards that first meeting with the poet and how Dorothy had allowed him free access to the manuscripts of Lyrical Ballads. ‘I dipped into a few of these with great satisfaction. I was not critically or sceptically inclined. I saw touches of truth and nature … and the sense of a new style of poetry came over me. It had to me something of the new effect that arises from the turning up of fresh soil, or the first welcome breath of Spring.’
Coleridge also read out to him some of Wordsworth’s ballads, in a sonorous and musical voice, and told Hazlitt, as he told all his friends, about the greatness of Mr Wordsworth. ‘He strides so far before you that he dwindles in the distance.’
The best known and the best received of William’s poems in the first volume of Lyrical Ballads was ‘Lines composed a few Miles above Tintern Abbey’. This was written by William after the rest of the book was at the printers, which was why it became the last poem in the collection. Having finished the book, so he thought, he went on a four- or five-day walking trip up the Wye valley with Dorothy. On the road back from Tintern, he was suddenly inspired to write the poem and composed it in three days, rushing it straight to the printers without making any alterations—a rare occurrence for him. His feelings of spontaneous joyfulness shine through: ‘No poem of mine was composed under circumstances more pleasant for me to remember than this.’
There were twenty-three poems in the book, nineteen by Wordsworth and only four by Coleridge, including the first one, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. This was obviously not a matter-of-fact, colloquial poem, but it represents the supernatural side of Lyrical Ballads. As a narrative poem, it is now considered one of the finest in the English language, though by 1799, even Wordsworth turned against it, disliking the archaic language, putting the blame on it for their poor reviews and suggesting to Cottle that it could be taken out, if there was ever another edition.
Coleridge even agreed with this, willing as ever to subjugate his muse to Wordsworth’s. By the time the book came out they realized they were different sorts of poet anyway, though still the most passionate of friends. Their attempt at complete collaboration had been brief—Wordsworth thought of the albatross for ‘The Ancient Mariner’, but little else. Wordsworth was never as keen as Coleridge was on the supernatural or the legendary, preferring to start on the ground, with hard, observed incidents or topics, mundane sights, ordinary people, and then build his poem up from there, rising into the mind and the spirit, rather than starting off from some fanciful, surrealistic, hallucinatory images.
Coleridge was probably the first to realize that what in fact Wordsworth was trying to do was give poetry higher aims than it currently had. Through the images of poetry, Wordsworth was doing nothing less than teaching men about his relationship with his fellows and with the universe. Even when Coleridge could see when it didn’t work, he still recognized the giant in Wordsworth, struggling to get out.
As we have seen, Lyrical Ballads was mainly Wordsworth’s production. Coleridge hadn’t produced much new material: of his three other poems (apart from ‘The Ancient Mariner’), one had already been published in the Morning Post and the other two were taken from his play. However, the book was published anonymously with neither poet’s name appearing anywhere. ‘Wordsworth’s name is nothing,’ said Coleridge, when Cottle suggested their names should appear, ‘and mine stinks.’ The first reactions, as they learned when they returned from Germany, seemed to prove Coleridge’s point.
William came straight back from Germany and headed for the north of England. Coleridge stayed on for a few more months, despite the death of his baby son Berkeley. He worried about William hiding himself away in the North, if indeed that was what he finally intended to do. ‘I think it is highly probable that where I live, there he will live, unless he should find in the North any person or persons who can feel and understand him, and reciprocate and react on him. My many weaknesses are of some advantage to me; they unite me more with the great mass of my fellow-beings but dear Wordsworth appears to me to have hurtfully segregated and isolated his being.’
William thought differently. He and Dorothy went first of all to Sockburn on Tees, the home of their old friends the Hutchinsons, where they based themselves for several months. ‘We have spent our time pleasantly enough in Germany,’ wrote William. ‘But we are right glad to find ourselves in England for we have learnt to know its value.’
Coleridge eventually dragged himself away from Germany and joined William in the north of England, going with him on a tremendous walking tour, right round the Lakes, in the autumn of 1799. Cottle, their erstwhile publisher, who had now gone back to bookselling, joined them for a while, and so did John Wordsworth, William’s sailor brother, who was between voyages. But mostly they were on their own. They climbed Helvellyn and toured the outlying valleys—ones, such as Ennerdale, that even the hardiest travel writers of the day never ventured into. William proudly showed his native land to Coleridge, who’d never been there before, and Coleridge was suitable enthralled.
It was on this trip that William revisited Grasmere Vale, and he chanced upon a little cottage that was available to rent. He decided it would be perfect for himself and Dorothy, just the two of them together again. It was up to Coleridge this time to decide if he wanted to live with them there. William’s roving days were over.
Some lines from the final poem in Lyrical Ballads, 1798.
For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.