William Wordsworth

The Critical Heritage, Volume I 1793-1820

Robert Woof

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN:
  9780415034418
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134966738
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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 formation 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.
This new volume in the series includes criticism on the work of William Wordsworth during the period 1793-1820. Extremely wide-ranging in its coverage, over 250 diary extracts, letters, reviews, comments, and opinions by and about Wordsworth are gathered together here for the first time. An invaluable addition to any literary library.

XVI

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Later opinions, 1815–1820

245. Charles Lamb

From letters to Wordsworth, April 1815

a. 7 April 1815

You have made me very proud with your successive book presents. I have been carefully through the two volumes to see that nothing was omitted which used to be there. I think I miss nothing but a Character in Antithet. manner which I do not know why you left out; the moral to the boys building the giant, the omission whereof leaves it in my mind less complete; and one admirable line gone (or something come in stead of it) ‘the stone-chat and the glancing sand-piper,’ which was a line quite alive. I demand these at your hand.¹ I am glad that you have not sacrificed a verse to those scoundrels. I would not have had you offer up the poorest rag that lingered upon the stript shoulders of little Alice Fell, to have atoned all their malice. I would not have given ’em a red cloak to save their souls. I am afraid lest that substitution of a shell (a flat falsification of the history) for the household implement as it stood at first, was a kind of tub thrown out to the beast, or rather thrown out for him. The tub was a good honest tub in its place, and nothing could fairly be said against it. You say you made the alteration for the ‘friendly reader,’ but the malicious will take it to himself. Damn ’em; if you give ’em an inch &c. The preface is noble and such as you should write: I wish I could set my name to it – Imprimatur – but you have set it there yourself, and I thank you.² I had rather be a doorkeeper in your margin, than have their proudest text swelling with my eulogies. The poems in the volumes which are new to me are so much in the old tone that I hardly received them as novelties. Of those, of which I had no previous knowledge, the four yew trees and the mysterious company which you have assembled there, most struck me –‘Death the Skeleton and Time the Shadow –’ [‘Yew-Trees’, PW, II, p. 10, 1. 27–8] It is a sight not for every youthful poet to dream of – it is one of the last results he must have gone thinking on for year for. Laodamia is a very original poem; I mean original with reference to your own manner. You have nothing like it. I should have seen it in a strange place, and greatly admired it, but not suspected its derivation …

I am almost sorry that you printed Extracts from those first Poems [Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches], or that you did not print them at length. They do not read to me as they do all together. Besides they have diminished the value of the original (which I possess) as a curiosity. I have hitherto kept them distinct in my mind as referring to a particular period of your life. All the rest of your poems are so much of a piece, they might have been written in the same week – these decidedly speak of an earlier period. They tell more of what you had been reading.

(The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas, 1935, II, 153–4)

b. Postmarked 28 April 1815

The more I read of your two last volumes, the more I feel it necessary to make my acknowledgm^ts. for them in more than one short letter. The Night Piece³ to which you refer me I meant fully to have noticed, but the fact is I come so fluttering and languid from business, tired with thoughts of it, frightened with fears of it, that when I get a few minutes to sit down to scribble (an action of the hand now seldom natural to me – I mean voluntary pen-work) I lose all presential memory of what I had intended to say, and say what I can …

– So I had meant to have mentioned Yarrow Visited, with that stanza, ‘But thou that didst appear so fair – ’ than which I think no lovelier stanza can be found in the wide world of poetry – yet the poem on the whole seems condemned to leave behind it a melancholy of imperfect satisfaction, as if you had wronged the feeling with which in what preceded it you had resolved never to visit it, and as if the Muse had determined in the most delicate manner to make you, and scarce make you, feel it. Else, it is far superior to the other [‘Yarrow Unvisited’], which has but one exquisite verse in it, the last but one, or the two last – this has all fine, except perhaps that that of ‘studious ease and generous cares’ has a little tinge of the less romantic about it. The farmer of Tilsbury vale is a charming counter part to poor Susan, with the addition of that delicacy towards aberrations from the strict path which is so fine in the Old Thief and the boy by his side, which always brings water into my eyes. Perhaps it is the worse for being a repetition. Susan stood for the representative of poor Rus in Urbe .⁴ There was quite enough to stamp the moral of the thing never to be forgotten. ‘Fast volumes of vapour’⁵ &c. The last verse of Susan was to be got rid of at all events. It threw a kind of dubiety upon Susan’s moral conduct. Susan is a servant maid. I see her trundling her mop and contemplating the whirling phenomenon thro’ blurred optics; but to term her a poor outcast seems as much as to say that poor Susan was no better than she should be, which I trust was not what you meant to express. Robin Goodfellow supports himself without that stick of a moral which you have thrown away, – but how I can be brought in felo de omittendo for that Ending to the boy builders is a mystery. I can’t say positively now – I only know that no line oftener or readier occurs than that ‘Light hearted boys, I will build up a giant with you.’⁶ It comes naturally with a warm holyday and the freshness of the blood. It is a perfect summer Amulet that I tye round my legs to quicken their motion when I go out a Maying. (N.B.) I don’t often go out a maying. – Must is the tense with me now. Do you take the Pun? Young Romilly is divine, the reasons of his mother’s grief being remediless.⁷ I never saw parental love carried up so high, towering above the other Loves. Shakspeare had done something for the filial in Cordelia, and by implication for the fatherly too in Lear’s resentment – he left it for you to explore the depths of the maternal heart. I get stupid, and flat and flattering – what’s the use of telling you what good things you have written, or – I hope I may add – that I know them to be good. Apropos – when I first opened upon the just mentioned poem, in a careless tone I said to Mary as if putting a riddle ‘What is good for a bootless bean?’ to which with infinite presence of mind (as the jest book has it) she answered, a ‘shoeless pea.’ It was the first joke she ever made. Joke the 2d I make – you distinguish well in your old preface between the verses of Dr. Johnson of the man in the Strand, and that from the babes of the wood. I was thinking whether taking your own glorious lines –

And for the love was in her soul

For the youthful Romilly –

which, by the love I bear my own soul, I think have no parallel in any of the best old Balads, and just altering it to –

And from the great respect she felt

For Sir Samuel Romilly –⁸

would not have explained the boundaries of prose expression and poetic feeling nearly as well. Excuse my levity on such an occasion. I never felt deeply in my life, if that poem did not make me, both lately and when I read it in MS. No alderman ever longed after a haunch of buck venison more than I for a Spiritual taste of that White Doe you promise. I am sure it is superlative, or will be when drest, i.e. printed. All things read raw to me in MS. – to compare magna parvis⁹, I cannot endure my own writings in that state. The only one which I think would not very much win upon me in print is Peter Bell. But I am not certain. You ask me about your preface. I like both that and the Supplement without an exception. The account of what you mean by Imagination is very valuable to me. It will help me to like some things in poetry better, which is a little humiliating in me to confess. I thought I could not be instructed in that science (I mean the critical), as I once heard old obscene beastly Peter Pindar in a dispute on Milton say he thought that if he had reason to value himself upon one thing more than another it was in knowing what good verse was. Who lookd over your proof sheets, and left ordebo¹⁰ in that line of Virgil?

(Ibid., II, 157–9)

EDITOR’S NOTES

1.Lamb seems unaware that ‘A Character in the Antithetical Manner’ had also been omitted from the editions of Lyrical Ballads of 1802 and 1805, and that the last stanza, the ‘moral’, of ‘Rural Architecture’ had been cut out of the 1805 edition: this stanza was restored in 1820, as was l. 27 of ‘Lines Left upon a Seat in a Yew-tree’: ‘The stone-chat, or the glancing sand-piper’. The poem, ‘A Character’, was not reprinted until the edition of 1837.

2.A reference to the Preface to the 1815 volumes, where Wordsworth quotes and acknowledges Lamb’s comments on the Imagination: see Lamb’s essay, ‘On the Genius and Character of Hogarth’, The Reflector 3, 1811.

3.‘The sky is overcast’, first published in 1815, though composed seventeen years before at Alfoxden. Wordsworth also drew Crabb Robinson’s attention to this poem: see entry 246d, 9 May 1815.

4.‘The Country in the City’ (Martial, XII, 57. 21).

5.Line 7 of ‘The Reverie of Poor Susan’: it should read ‘Bright volumes of vapour’.

6.Wordsworth must have indicated that it was Lamb himself who was responsible for the omission (in 1805) of the last verse of ‘Rural Architecture’. Lamb seems to have forgotten this early critical remark and, of course, to have been unaware that the verse had been omitted in 1805. It is interesting that Wordsworth took sufficient notice of Lamb’s now positive comments to restore the verse in 1820.

7.See ‘The Force of Prayer’.

8.Romilly (1757–1818), the great legal reformer.

9.‘Great to small’.

10.Lamb is pointing out that Wordsworth has allowed a misprint in his quotation from Virgil’s Eclogues, I, 75–6: the word ‘ordebo’ should be ‘videbo’ meaning, in the context, ‘shall I see’.

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Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Frontmatter
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• General Editor's Preface
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations and Note on References
• Introduction with Select Bibliography
• I Early notices and opinions, 1793–1801
• II Lyrical Ballads: Opinions, November 1798–July 1800
• III Lyrical Ballads: Reviews, October 1798–April 1800
• IV Lyrical Ballads:Opinions, August 1800–February 1801
• V Lyrical Ballads:Reviews, February 1801–April 1804
• VI Poems, 1807: Reviews, 1807–1811
• VII Poems, 1807:Opinions, 1806–1814
• VIII Convention Of Cintra: Reviews And Opinions, 1809–1833
• IX The Excursion:Reviews, 1814–1820
• X The Excursion:Some Opinions, 1812–1818
• XI Poems, 1815 and The White Doe of Rylstone: Reviews and Opinions, 1808–1820
• XII Letter to A Friend of Robert Burns:,Reviews and Opinions, 1816–1817
• XIII ‘Thanksgiving Ode’: Reviews and Opinions, 1816–1817
• XIV ‘Peter Bell’ And ‘The Waggoner’:Reviews and Opinions, 1819
• XV ‘The River Duddon’: Reviews and Opinions, 1820–1821
• XVI Later Opinions, 1815–1820
• Index