by Will Durant
The National Portrait Gallery contains a tender portrait of Lamb by his friend William Hazlitt (1778–1830), the liveliest and sharpest literary critic of the time. Hazlitt visited Coleridge in 1798, and again, at Greta Hall, in 1803. On the second occasion Wordsworth joined them, and the three set about determining whether God existed. William Paley, as we have seen, had recently defended the affirmative with the argument from design; Hazlitt countered it; Wordsworth took a middle ground, affirming God not as external to the universe and guiding it from without, but as inherent in it as its life and mind. On that visit Hazlitt incurred the wrath of the neighbors by seducing a schoolgirl. Fearing arrest or worse, he fled to Grasmere, where Wordsworth gave him a night’s lodging and, the next morning, advanced him funds to pay coach fare to London.
When Coleridge and Wordsworth turned against the Revolution, and denounced Napoleon in fervent verse, Hazlitt set them down as turncoats, and wrote a four-volume Life of Napoleon Buonaparte (1828–30) from Napoleon’s point of view. Meanwhile he had made his mark as a critic with his lectures (1820) on the Elizabethan drama, and his contemporary portraits in The Spirit of the Age (1825); Wordsworth did not enjoy its satirical attack on the “peasant school” in literature.107
The aging poet liked better Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859), who offered him a continuo of admiration. Thomas was a genius in his own right, who was to alarm Britain in 1821 with Confessions of an English Opium Eater. Beginning as a prodigy, speaking classic Greek readily at fifteen, running away from school and Oxford as too slow for his pace, he must have surprised himself by his delight with the unpretentious simplicity of the Lyrical Ballads. In May, 1803, he wrote to Wordsworth such a letter as might have turned the solitary poet’s head:
I have no other motive in soliciting your friendship than what (I should think) every man who has read and felt the “Lyrical Ballads” must have in common with me. The whole aggregate of pleasure I have received from eight or nine other poets that I have been able to find since the world began falls infinitely short of what these two enchanting volumes have singly afforded me;—that your name is with me forever linked to the lovely scenes of nature…. What claim can I urge to a fellowship with such a society as yours, beaming (as it does) with genius so wild and so magnificent?
He added that Wordsworth would never find anyone “more ready… to sacrifice even his life whenever it would have a chance of promoting your interest and happiness.”
Wordsworth’s reply was a model of kindly instruction. “My friendship,” he wrote, “is not in my power to give; this is a gift which no man can make…. A sound and healthy friendship is the growth of time and circumstance; it will spring up like a wildflower when these favour, and when they do not it is in vain to look for it.” He tried to deter the youth from seeking a regular correspondence: “I am the most lazy and impotent letter writer in the world.” But he added: “I shall indeed be very happy to see you at Grasmere.”108
Despite his ardor, De Quincey let three years pass before accepting the invitation. Then, reaching sight of Wordsworth’s cottage, he lost courage, and, like the fabled pilgrim nearing Rome, turned back as unworthy. But late in 1807, at Bristol, Coleridge accepted his offer to escort Mrs. Coleridge and her children to Keswick. On the way she stopped with him at Dove Cottage, and now, at last, De Quincey saw Wordsworth “plain,” as Browning was soon to see Shelley. “Like a flash of lightning I saw the figure emerge of a tallish man, who held out his hand and saluted me with most cordial expressions of welcome.”109
XV. SOUTHEY: 1803–43
Meanwhile, at Greta Hall and London, Southey, with his industrious but uninspired pen, supported his wife Edith, his five daughters (born between 1804 and 1812), and a fondly idolized son who died in 1816 at the age of ten. After Coleridge’s passage to Malta Southey took over responsibility for Mrs. Coleridge and her children. Even Wordsworth sometimes leaned on him: when William’s brother John was lost at sea (1805) the news threw the Grasmere household into such grief that Wordsworth sent a message to Southey begging him to come down and help him comfort Dorothy and Mary. He came, and “he was so tender and kind,” Dorothy wrote, “that I loved him at once; he wept with us in our sorrow, and for that cause I think I must always love him.”110
Vanity misled him for a while; he composed epic after epic, each a failure; the times were their own epic. He resigned himself to prose, and fared better. In 1807 he published Letters from England: By Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella, and put into the mouth of this imaginary Spaniard a strong denunciation of child labor and other conditions in British factories.
E.g.,
I ventured to inquire concerning the morals of the people who were trained up in this monstrous manner, and found… that in consequence of herding together such numbers of both sexes, utterly uninstructed in the commonest principles of religion and morality, they were as debauched and profligate as human beings under the influence of such circumstances must inevitably be; the men drunken, the women dissolute; that however high the wages they earned, they were too improvident ever to lay by for a time of need; and that, though the parish was not at the expense of maintaining them as children, it had to provide for them in diseases induced by their mode of life, or in premature disability or old age.111
The aristocrat’s conclusion on the English economy: “In commerce, even more than in war, both men and beasts are considered mainly as machines, and sacrificed with even less compunction.”112
Southey soon found that he could not live by his pen, much less support his dependents, especially in time of war, unless he adopted a more conservative line. The change was smoothed by a governmental pension of one hundred sixty pounds a year (1807), and an invitation to contribute articles regularly to the Tory Quarterly Review. In 1813 he raised his status both as an author and as a patriot by issuing his Life of Nelson—a clear and vivid narrative based on laborious research, and written in an eighteenth-century style so simple, clear, and smooth that it carries the reader along despite obtrusions of the writer’s natural bias in favor of his hero and his country. Nelson’s infatuation with Emma Hamilton is reduced from a decade to a paragraph.
Byron, Shelley, and Hazlitt mourned when Southey seemed to lower the prestige of poetry by accepting the laureateship of England. This distinction had fallen in prestige when Pitt (1790) gave it to Henry Pye, an obscure justice of the peace. At Pye’s death (1813) the government offered the post to Walter Scott, who refused it and recommended Southey as a deserving laborer. Southey accepted it, and was rewarded by an increase of his pension to three hundred pounds a year. Wordsworth, who should have had the appointment, remarked handsomely: “Southey has a little world dependent on his industry.”113
Byron, who was later to condemn Southey to obloquy and oblivion, spoke well of him after a meeting with him at Holland House in September, 1813: “The best-looking bard I have seen in some time.”114 And to Thomas Moore: “To have that poet’s head and shoulders I would almost have written his sapphics. He is certainly a prepossessing person to look at, a man of talent…. His manners are mild…. His prose is perfect.”115 But Southey’s evident anxiety to please the holders of wealth or power brought Byron into open war against him in 1818. The unkindest cut of all came when a group of rebels secured the manuscript of Southey’s radical drama Wat Tyler (which he had written in 1794 and left unprinted), and published it with joy in 1817.
Southey retired to Greta Hall, his library, and his wife. She had more than once neared insanity; in 1834 her mind gave way, and in 1837 she died. Southey himself gave up the battle in 1843; and then, by almost universal consent, and over his own protests, Wordsworth was made poet laureate.
XVI. WORDSWORTH EPILOGUE: 1815–50
Poetry belongs to youth, and Wordsworth, living eighty years, died as a poet about 1807, when, aged thirty-seven, he composed The White Doe of Rylstone. By that time Walter Scott had published The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805); Wordsworth envied its flowing style, and used the mete
r for his own “lay”—a narrative ballad about the religious wars of north England in the twelfth year of Elizabeth I. Almost an entire family—father and eight sons—was wiped out in one campaign. Emily, the surviving sister, spends the rest of her life in mourning; a white doe comes daily to comfort her, and it accompanies her in her Sabbath visits to the tomb of the youngest brother in Bolton churchyard. When Emily dies the doe continues, alone, those weekly trips from Rylstone to Bolton, and lies quietly beside the grave till the Sabbath service in the church is over, then quietly returns, through woods and streams, to its Rylstone haunts. It is a pretty legend, gracefully and melodiously told.
This was the last triumph of Wordsworth’s art. Aside from some sonnets, which he emitted at the slightest provocation, he did no more for poetry. Physically fifty, he looked every inch a sage, tall and stately, wrapped in warm garments against the incalculable cold, hair receding and carelessly tangled, head bent, eyes grave in contemplation, as of one who, having seen Shelley and Byron pass from infancy through ecstasy to death, now calmly awaited his turn, confident that he would leave a monument more lasting than passionate utopias or sardonic rhymes.
He had the defects of his virtues, for it takes much egotism to preach to mankind. “Milton is his greatest idol,” wrote Hazlitt, “and he sometimes dared to compare himself with him.”116 He accepted praise as unavoidable, and resented criticism as ingratitude. He loved to recite his own poetry, as was slyly noted by Emerson, who visited him in 1833; but he had said, in a preface of 1815, that his poems were meant to be read aloud; and in fact they were music as well as meaning, and a lyric deserves a lyre.
Of course he became conservative as he aged; it was a privilege—perhaps a duty—of years; and if Byron and Shelley did not recognize this it may have been because they died in the dementia praecox of youth. The deterioration of the French Revolution from constitution to dissolution gave Wordsworth some excuse for caution; and the brutality of the Industrial Revolution seemed to justify his feeling that something wholesome and beautiful had passed from England with the replacement of the sturdy yeomanry by the factory “hand.” In 1805 and later, by gift or purchase, he had become the owner of several modest properties; and as a landholder he readily sympathized with the “landed interest” as the cement of economic order and social stability. Hence he opposed the reform movement as a plan of the manufacturers to reduce the cost of corn, and therefore of labor, by repealing those “Corn Laws” that impeded, with high tariff dues, the import of foreign grain.
He, who had been through many years an admirer of Godwin, now rejected Godwin’s free individualism on the ground that individuals can survive only through a communal unity maintained by general respect for tradition, property, and law. After 1815 he supported the government in all its repressive measures, and was branded as an apostate from the cause of liberty. He held his ground, and countered with his final diagnosis of the age: “The world is running mad with its notion that its evils are to be relieved by political changes, political remedies, political nostrums, whereas the great evils—civilization, bondage, misery—lie deep in the heart, and nothing but virtue and religion can remove them.”117
So he appealed to the English people to support the Church of England. He versified some English history in forty-seven “Ecclesiastical Sonnets” (1821), which bore us with their forgotten heroes and sometimes surprise us by their excellence. According to Henry Crabb Robinson, “Wordsworth said he would shed his blood, if necessary, to defend the Established Church. Nor was he disconcerted by a laugh raised against him on account of his having before confessed that he knew not when he had been in a church in his own country.”118
We do not find that he sought comfort in religion when the world of love around him began to crumble. In 1829 Dorothy suffered a severe attack of stone, which permanently weakened her health and spirit. Further attacks damaged her nervous system; after 1835 she lost the use of her legs, and her memory failed except for events in the distant past, and for her brother’s poems, which she could still recite. For the next twenty years she remained in the household as helpless and quietly insane, sitting silent in her chair near the fire, and waiting patiently for death. In 1835 Sara Hutchinson died, and Wordsworth was left with his wife Mary to care for his sister and his children. In 1837 he had still sufficient fortitude to undertake, with the omnipresent Robinson, a six months’ tour of France and Italy. In Paris he met again Annette Vallon and his daughter Caroline, now securely wed.
He died on April 23, 1850, and was buried among his neighbors in Grasmere churchyard. Dorothy lingered five years more, patiently tended by Mary, who was now nearly blind. Mary herself died in 1859, aged eighty-nine, after a long life of duties faithfully performed. There must have been something in Wordsworth greater than his poetry to have won the lasting love of such women. They too, and their like in a million homes, should be remembered as part of the picture of England.
CHAPTER XXII
The Rebel Poets
1788–1824*
I. THE TARNISHED STRAIN: 1066–1809
TO understand Byron we should have to know with some fullness the history and character of the ancestors whose blood ran like an intermittent fever in his veins. Some of that blood, like his name, may have come from France, where several Birons were remembered by history; Byron himself proudly mentioned, in Don Juan (Canto x, line 36), a supposed progenitor, Radulfus de Burun, as having come over to England with William the Conqueror. In the twelfth century the Buruns became Byrons. A Sir John Byron served Henry VIII so well that, on the dissolution of the monasteries, the King transferred to him, for a nominal sum, the abbey (founded about 1170) and lands of “the late Monastery and Priory of Newstede … within our County of Nottingham.”1 A succession of baronial Byrons thereafter played minor parts in English history, supporting the Stuart kings, following Charles II into exile, forfeiting Newstead Abbey, regaining it at the Restoration.
The poet’s great-uncle William, the fifth Lord Byron (1722–98), handsome and reckless, served in the Navy; earned the name “Wicked Lord” by living as a rake in the Abbey; squandered much of his wealth; killed his relative William Chaworth in an impromptu duel in a darkened room of a tavern; was sent to the Tower on a charge of murder; was tried by the House of Lords (1765), was declared “not guilty of murder, but guilty of manslaughter”; retired to the Abbey, and lived there in somber isolation till his death.
His brother John Byron (1723–86) became a midshipman, suffered shipwreck, and published a Narrative from which his grandson took the vivid shipwreck scene in Don Juan. As commander of the Dolphin John circumnavigated the globe. Finally he retired to a home in west England, where he was known as “the Nautical Lover” because he had a wife or a mistress in every port.
His eldest son, Captain John Byron (1756–91), father of the poet, crowded so many deviltries into his thirty-five years that he was called “Mad Jack.” After service in the American colonies he spent some time in London, making his mistresses pay his debts. In 1778 he eloped with the Marchioness of Carmarthen; her husband the Marquess divorced her, Captain Byron married her and enjoyed her income. She bore him three children, of whom one, Augusta Leigh, became the poet’s half sister and sometimes mistress.
In 1784 the former Lady Carmarthen died. A year later the dashing widower married a Scotch girl of twenty years and £23,000—Catherine Gordon of Gight, plain but fiercely proud, with a pedigree going back to James I of Scotland. When she bore the poet she gave him another line of distinguished and hectic heredity: French in origin, stormy in character, with a turn for robbery, murder, and feud. The mother herself was a medley of wild love and hate. These she spent upon her husband, who squandered her fortune and then deserted her; and then upon her only son, whom she pampered with affection, bruised with discipline, and alienated with such epithets as “lame brat.” Said Childe Harold (i.e., Byron), “I should have known what fruit would spring from such a seed.”2
George Gordon Byron w
as born in London January 22, 1788. His right foot, at birth, was deformed by an inward turn of the sole and an upward tension of the heel. The deformity might have been cured by daily manipulation of the foot; but the mother had neither the patience nor the hardihood for a procedure that would have seemed to the child intentionally cruel; nor were the physicians inclined to recommend it. By the age of eight the misshapen foot had so far improved that the boy could wear a common shoe over an inner shoe designed to balance and diminish the distortion. In daily life and in sports he became agile on his feet, but he could not cross a drawing room without painful consciousness of his limp. In youth he flared up at any mention of his handicap. It shared in sharpening his sensitivity and temper; but it probably spurred him on to victories—in swimming, courtship, and poetry—that might divert attention from his deformity.
In 1789 the mother moved with her child to Aberdeen. A year later her husband fled to France, where he died in 1791, dissolute and destitute. Left with only a fragment of her fortune, Mrs. Byron did her best to give her son an education fit for a lord. She described him fondly, when he was six, “as a fine boy, and walks and runs as well as any other child.”3 At seven he entered Aberdeen Grammar School, where he received a good grounding in Latin. Through further education and much travel in Greece, Asia Minor, and Italy, he became so familiar with Latin and Greek literature that only an accomplished scholar in classical antiquity can understand the quotations and historical allusions that emerge through the playfulness of Don Juan. Byron loved history—cleansed of nationalism and mythology—as the only truth about man; Shelley ignored it, being wedded to an ideal uncomfortable with history.
In 1798 Byron’s great—uncle, “the Wicked Lord,” died at Newstead, leaving the ten-year-old boy his baronial title, the Abbey, his 3,200 acres, and his debts. These were so profuse that only enough income remained to enable the widow to move from Aberdeen to the Abbey, and live there in middleclass comfort. She sent her boy to a school at Dulwich, and, in 1801, to the famous “public” school at Harrow, eleven miles from London. There he resisted the “fagging” services usually required of the younger by the older students; and when he himself, as an upper—class man, used a “fag,” it was with a quite revolutionary courtesy. He was a troublesome pupil, disrupted discipline, committed pranks, and neglected the studies assigned; but he did much reading, often of good books, and rising to Bacon, Locke, Hume, and Berkeley. Apparently he lost his religious faith, for a fellow student called him a “damned atheist.”4
