Part 8

All we know of Wordsworth, and all the facts in Professor Harper’s story, make it impossible to believe that he would willingly have deserted Marie-Anne and his daughter. The baptism of the child was entered in the registry of baptisms in the parish of Sainte-Croix, “Williams Wordsodsth” in his absence being represented by a local official. She was baptised Anne Caroline, and it was as Anne Caroline Wordsworth, daughter of “Williams Wordsworth, landowner,” that she was married in Paris about twenty-four years later. Wordsworth appears to have kept constantly in touch with her and her mother in the meantime, and, when peace was in sight in 1802, he and his sister Dorothy determined to cross to France and see them. A meeting took place in Calais. It was the preliminary to a marriage, but not to marriage with Annette, who, indeed, never married, but went through life as Madame Vallon. Two months after the Calais meeting Wordsworth married Mary Hutchinson. That he had been deeply moved by the meeting with his child rather than with her mother is suggested by the mood of the sonnet he wrote at the time: “It is a beauteous evening, calm and free.”

Professor Harper is of opinion that Wordsworth’s love for Marie-Anne Vallon was an event of supreme importance in his life. He holds that the facts he has discovered throw “light upon many of Wordsworth’s poems.” I do not think that on this point he has proved his case. In his two-volume life of Wordsworth, it may be remembered, he even goes so far as to assign the “Lucy” of so many beautiful poems to a French original. Lovers of a great poet are naturally led to speculate as to the experiences out of which his poems grew. There is nothing of the vice of Paul Pry in attempting thus to discover the sources of the experiences the poet communicates in his verse. The theme of every poet is the experiences that have moved his soul most profoundly. And many, or most, of those experiences spring from his relations with other human beings. At the same time, there is no evidence that Wordsworth in his work was ever influenced by Marie-Anne Vallon as Keats was influenced by Fanny Brawne. It is doubtful if any women every really took the place of his sister in his heart. “She gave me eyes, she gave me ears,” could be said only of Dorothy. It was the fire of affection, not the fire of passion, that glowed in Wordsworth’s soul. “Oh, my dear, dear sister!” he cried in one of his letters, “with what transport shall I again meet you! With what rapture shall I again wear out the day in your sight. So eager is my desire to see you that all other obstacles vanish. I see you in a moment running, or rather flying, to my arms.” He was in life as in literature a devoted brother rather than a devoted lover. Even Professor Harper can give no other woman but Dorothy the position of presiding genius over his life and work. This does not necessarily involve our acceptance of the common theory that Dorothy was the original around whom the “Lucy” poems were written. But, had Lucy been a Frenchwoman, Wordsworth would hardly have written:

I travelled among unknown men In lands beyond the sea; Nor England did I know till then What love I bore to thee....

Among thy mountains did I feel The joy of my desire; And she I cherished turned her wheel Beside an English fire.

To interpret this as a dramatisation of his early passion in France is to strain probability.[1]

[1] I understand that Professor Harper disclaims what seemed to me the obvious interpretation of a passage in his book.

Professor Harper, then, has discovered an interesting episode in Wordsworth’s life, but I do not think he has discovered what may be called a key episode. It may turn out to have had more influence on Wordsworth’s destiny than at present appears. But we do not yet know enough even about the circumstances to get any fresh light from it either on his work or on his character.

As regards Annette, we learn from a letter of Dorothy’s, written in 1815, that she shared, and continued to share, the Royalist convictions of her people. She often, Dorothy affirms, “risked her life in defence of adherents to that cause, and she despised and detested Buonaparte.” In 1820, Wordsworth, his wife, and Dorothy visited Paris and lived on intimate terms with Annette, Caroline, and Caroline’s husband. They even went to lodge in the same street. Of Caroline it was reported earlier that “she resembles her father most strikingly.” For the rest, Christopher Wordsworth, Bishop of Lincoln, when writing his uncle’s biography, said nothing about the matter. He cannot be accused of having hidden anything of very great significance. The truth is now out, and we know little more about Wordsworth than we knew before.

XIV

THE POETRY OF POE

“My first object (as usual) was originality,” said Poe, in discussing the versification of “The Raven.” It is a remarkable fact that the two great poets of America--Poe and Whitman--were two of the most deliberately original poets of the nineteenth century--in English at least. They were both conscious frontiersmen of poetry, drawn to unmapped territories, settlers on virgin soil. This may help to explain some of their imperfections. Each of them gives us the impression of a genius rich but imperfectly cultivated. Different though they were from each other, they resembled each other in a certain lack of the talent of order, of taste, of “finish.” They were both capable of lapses from genius into incompetence, from beauty into provincialism, to an unusual degree. A contemporary critic said of Poe that he had not talent equal to his genius. Neither had Whitman. In the greatest poets, genius and talent go hand in hand. Poe seldom wrote a poem in which his mood seems to have attained its perfect expression. His poetry does not get near perfection even in the sense in which Coleridge’s fragments do. It seems, as a rule, like a first sketch for greater things. His _Complete Poems_, indeed, is one of the most wonderful sketch-books of a man of genius in literature.

Poe himself attributed the defects of his work to lack of leisure rather than to lack of talent. “Events not to be controlled,” he said in the preface to the 1845 edition of his poems, “have prevented me from making, at any time, any serious effort in what, under happier circumstances, would have been the field of my choice. With me poetry has been not a purpose but a passion, and the passions should be held in reverence; they must not--they cannot at will be excited, with an eye to the petty compensations, or the more petty commendations, of mankind.” Other poets, however, who have lived in as bitter circumstances as Poe, have written an incomparably greater body of good poetry. There was in him some flaw that kept him, as a rule, from being more than a great beginner. It may have been partly due to theatrical qualities that he inherited from his actress mother. Again and again he mingles the landscape of dreamland with the tawdry grandeur of the stage. He takes a footlights view of romance when, having begun “Lenore” with the lines----

Ah, broken is the golden bowl!--the spirit flown for ever!-- Let the bell toll!--a saintly soul floats on the Stygian river

he continues:

And, Guy de Vere, hast _thou_ no tear?--weep now, or never more.

This, no doubt, was in tune with the fashionable romance of the day, but Poe’s romantic conceptions at times were those of one who was especially entranced by stage trappings. He made his heroines rich and highborn as well as beautiful. In “Lenore” he cries:

Wretches, ye loved her for her wealth, and hated her for her pride!

In “The Sleeper” he speaks of:

The crested palls Of her grand family funerals.

In “Annabel Lee” he made the very angels heroes of the green-room:

Her highborn kinsmen came And bore her away from me.

On the other hand, Poe’s theatricalism, though it explains some of the faults of his poetry, leaves unexplained the fact that he has cast a greater spell on succeeding poets than has even so great a theatrical genius as Byron. Poe is one of those poets who are sources of poetry. He discovered--though not without forerunners such as Coleridge--a new borderland for the imagination, where death and despair had a new strangeness. He seems to have reached it, not through mere fancy, as his imitators do, but through experience. When he was a youth he worshipped Mrs. Helen Stannard, the mother of one of his friends. She went mad and died, and for some time after her death Poe used to haunt her tomb by night, and “when the autumnal rains fell and the winds wailed mournfully over the graves, he lingered longest, and came away most regretfully.” J. H. Ingram and other writers have found in these “solitary churchyard vigils” the clue to “much that seems strange and abnormal in the poet’s after life.” Love overshadowed by death, beauty overshadowed by death, remained the recurrent theme of his verse. It is the theme of his supreme poem, “Annabel Lee,” with its haunting close:

In the sepulchre there by the sea, In her tomb by the sounding sea.

Poe was a poet for whom life was darkened by experience and illuminated only by visions. In the beginning, romance

loves to nod and sing With drowsy head and painted wing, Among the green leaves as they shake Far down within some shadowy lake.

In time, however, this born day-dreamer can find no comfort in day-dreaming:

Of late, eternal Condor years So shake the very Heaven on high With tumult as they thunder by, I have no time for idle cares Through gazing on the unquiet sky. And when an hour with calmer wings Its down upon my spirit flings-- That little time with lyre and rhyme To while away--forbidden things!-- My heart would feel to be a crime Unless it trembled with the strings.

There is a terrible sincerity in Poe’s sense of the presence of death. His vision of mortal men, at least, was not theatrical in its gloom:

Mimes, in the form of God on high, Mutter and mumble low, And hither and thither fly-- Mere puppets they, who come and go At bidding of vast formless things That shift the scenery to and fro, Flapping from out their Condor wings Invisible Woe!

Poe and Whitman were both poets preoccupied with the thought of death, but, whereas Whitman forced himself to praise it, Poe was in revolt against it as the ultimate tyrant. He saw it as the one thing that made dreadful those enchanted islands, those enchanted valleys, those enchanted palaces in which, for him, so much of the beauty of the world took refuge. He could not reconcile himself to a world that was governed by mortality. There is the wistfulness of the exile from a lost Paradise running through his verse. He is essentially a man for whom the spiritual universe exists. His angels and demons may not resemble the angels and demons of the churches--may, indeed, be little more than formulæ in his dreamland. But they are at least the formulæ of a poet into whose dreams has come the rumour of immortality. He cannot believe that the City of Death, with its awful stillness, can last for ever--that city where

Shrines and palaces and towers (Time-eaten towers that tremble not!) Resemble nothing that is ours. Around, by lifting winds forgot, Resignedly beneath the sky The melancholy waters lie.

He feels that somewhere Eldorado is to be found, as it is by the knight who sought it:

And as his strength Failed him at length He met a pilgrim shadow-- “Shadow,” said he, “Where can it be-- This land of Eldorado?”

“Over the Mountains Of the Moon, Down the Valley of the Shadow, Ride, boldly ride,” The shade replied-- “If you seek for Eldorado!”

It is true that his vision, whether of life or immortality, has something of the incoherence of the landscape of his “Dreamland”:

Mountains toppling evermore Into seas without a shore.

If his imagination passes “out of space, out of time,” it is on the wings of trance rather than of faith. At the same time, his dreams would not have made so strong an appeal to generations of readers if they had been mere sensational fancies, and had not seemed to wander in a wider universe than we are conscious of in our everyday life. They cannot be dismissed as the visions of a drugged man. They are the questionings of a spirit.

It may be that, like some of the decadents of Europe, Poe was preyed upon by a demon--that he was an outcast poet in whose sky was

The cloud that took the form (When the rest of Heaven was blue) Of a demon in my view.

But in the best of the decadents the soul survived; and if they have a place in literature it is because they have left a record of the travels of the prodigal soul in a far country. Poe, though not sharing their decadence, is also the poet of a far country. That loveliest of his poems (if we except “Annabel Lee”), “To Helen”--what is it but a triumphant cry of return? Unlike “The Raven,” it is a poem that never loses its beauty with repetition. “Annabel Lee” may be the fullest expression of his genius, but “To Helen” is the most exquisite. Even to write it down, hackneyed though it is, renews one’s delight:

Helen, thy beauty is to me Like those Nicean barks of yore, That gently, o’er the perfumed sea, The weary, way-born wanderer bore To his own native shore.

On desperate seas long wont to roam, Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face, Thy Naiad airs have brought me home To the glory that was Greece And the grandeur that was Rome.

Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche How statue-like I see thee stand The agate lamp within thy hand! Ah, Psyche, from the regions which Are Holy Land!

Here, as nowhere else, Poe achieved coherent and consummate grace of form. Here, if almost nowhere else, his talent was equal to his genius.

XV

HAWTHORNE

Hawthorne is the only American admitted into the English Men of Letters Series. This may be partly accidental, and due to the fact that it was possible to get so fine a critic as Henry James to write about him. It also suggests, however, that in 1879 Hawthorne was held in higher esteem than he is held to-day. There are several American writers about whom we are nowadays more curious. Emerson does not soar at quite such an altitude as he once did, but he is still an indubitable figure of genius on the sunny side of the clouds. Thoreau, with the challenge of his sardonic simplicity, will interest us so long as there is a society to protest against. Poe, after we have refined him in the fiercest fires of criticism, remains gold of the most precious. Whitman holds us as the giant aborigine of democracy as well as the rhapsodist of brotherhood and death. Washington Irving, on the other hand, has disappeared except from the schoolbooks, and Oliver Wendell Holmes has ceased to be read by people under fifty. Longfellow has become an exiguous contributor to an anthology except in so far as he is taught, like Irving, to schoolchildren, and Lowell is oftener quoted by politicians than by critics of letters. There is no need to discuss just now whether this waning of reputations is likely to be permanent. It is enough to note that Hawthorne, though he has not waned to the extent that Longfellow has, has ceased for most readers to be a star of the first or second magnitude. How many critics would now place him, as he was once placed, among the great masters of English prose? How many editors of a series of lives of great writers would unhesitatingly include in it a life of Nathaniel Hawthorne?

Hawthorne may nevertheless justly be regarded as a classic, and there have been few writers whose short stories would bear re-reading so well as Hawthorne’s three-quarters of a century after their first appearance. The prose, as anyone may see by dipping into Mr. Carl van Doren’s admirable selection from _Twice-told Tales_, _Mosses from an Old Manse_, and _The Snow Image_, is beautiful prose, even if it falls short of supreme greatness. It flows with a rhythm at once charming and forceful. It is transparent, and through it we can see life as Hawthorne’s imagination played on it like sunlight refracted through water. He is a music-maker rather than a phrase-maker in his use of words. Movement is more to him than metaphor, though he can combine them attractively, as in the opening sentence of _The Seven Vagabonds_:

Rambling on foot in the spring of my life and the summer of the year, I came one afternoon to a point which gave me the choice of three directions.

You may turn Hawthorne’s pages almost at random, and you can scarcely help noticing example after example of this characteristic rhythm of his. It is noticeable even in such a simple narrative sentence as that with which _The Artist of the Beautiful_ opens:

An elderly man, with his pretty daughter on his arm, was passing along the street, and emerged from the gloom of the cloudy evening into the light that fell across the pavement from the window of a small shop.

And, again, we find it in a meditative passage such as:

I saw mankind, in this weary old age of the world, either enduring a sluggish existence amid the smoke and dust of cities, or, if they breathed a purer air, still lying down at night with no hope but to wear out to-morrow, and all the to-morrows which make up life, among the same dull scenes and in the same wretched toil that had darkened the sunshine of to-day.

This all flows with something of the noble ease of hexameters, yet without falling into the vices of pseudo-poetic prose. The mere sound of his sentences gives Hawthorne’s prose a wonderful momentum that keeps us interested even when at times we begin to wonder if his subject-matter is quite as interesting as it ought to be. This grave and equable momentum is one of his greatest technical qualities. It is a quality that cannot be adequately illustrated in single sentences or detached passages, because its success is not the success of occasional felicities but of something sustained and pervasive. It may even be imputed as a fault to Hawthorne that he can never, or almost never, escape from the equable rhythm of his prose. He seldom ends a story with the slightly different momentum due to an ending. It is not merely, however, that his stories end quietly: he is like a rider who rides beautifully but does not know how to dismount. He maintains his graceful ease of motion until the last moment, and then he slides off as best he can.

But it would be folly to regard Hawthorne’s rhythm as wholly--or even mainly--a technical quality. The rhythm of prose is never that, and it is in vain to play the sedulous ape to the great masters if nothing but their style is imitated. It is not an accident that the greatest English prose is to be found in the Bible. The rhythm of the greatest prose seems at times the rhythm of the spirit of man as it contemplates the life of men in the light of eternity. The rhythm to a Plato, a Milton, a Sir Thomas Browne, is inevitably of a kind that a Jane Austen or a Thackeray, with all their genius, could never achieve. It is the echo of the emotion felt by men to whom time and place are fables with another meaning besides that which appears on the surface. The realists can never write the greatest prose, because to them the world they see is not fabulous but a hard fact. The greatest writers all see the world as fabulous. Their men and women are inhabited by angels or devils, or, on a lower plane, have something of the nature of ghosts or fairies or goblins. If Othello were not a fable as well as a man, he would be no better than a criminal lunatic. If King Lear were not a fable as well as man, he would be a subject for the psychoanalyst. Imagine either of them as a modern Englishman, putting his case before a judge and jury, and you will see how the artist, even though his characters as a rule are characters such as may be found in reality, must remove them out of and above reality into the region of fables in order to make them permanently real to the imagination. Dickens turned Victorian England into a myth peopled by goblins. Dostoievsky turned Russia into a myth peopled by goblins and demons. It is not that they denied the reality of the world before their eyes, but that they saw within it and about it another world apart from which it had very little meaning.