SOURCE: “Lyrical Ballads.” The Athenæum 95 (May 10, 1890): 599-600.

[In the following review, the anonymous author notes that Lyrical Ballads did not meet with the critical response it deserved when originally published and recommends a closer study of the poems to highlight their merit.]

This reprint should be received as a welcome gift by the poor scholar. It is not called by the much-abused name of “facsimile,” but it possesses all the advantages which could attach to that unattainable ideal. The little book is simply a neat, well-edited reprint, following its original line for line and page for page. The chief virtue of a reprint is to be correct, and how faithfully Prof. Dowden has endeavoured in this direction is indicated by his offering a sort of apology for venturing to leave the proper space between two words which the printer of the original had inadvertently run together in ‘Simon Lee,’ thus,—

Could leave both man and horsebehind.

The emendation carries a useful lesson to editors. When making reprints such as this of books produced in the leisurely days of the hand-press, it is well to examine more than one copy—desirable, even, to examine a dozen, if so many are available—for the text often varies more or less in copies of the same edition. The author, editor, or corrector seems to have been in the habit of examining the sheets as they left the press, and of stopping it occasionally to make a correction or an alteration. In the case of the Lyrical Ballads this must have been done—so far, at least, as the sheet containing ‘Simon Lee’ is concerned, for in some copies the words in the line quoted are properly spaced. But Prof. Dowden has not confined his labours to securing the mechanical accuracy of his reprint. He has supplied an excellent preface, giving something of the history of the volume, and pointing out its significance in our literature; while his notes, though brief, are to the point, and bear evidence of being founded on an intimate knowledge of the several poems and of the various phases through which they have passed.

No book in modern English literature could be better worth reprinting in this scholarly fashion than the first issue of the Lyrical Ballads. The original is rare and expensive, and is even more interesting to the student than to the book-hunter. To each it is just twice as attractive as any other first edition, seeing that it contains the early productions in their earliest “states” of two first-rate poets, each of whom is represented by work he never surpassed—the volume beginning with The Ancient Mariner, and closing with the ‘Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey.’ But a reprint such as this may well satisfy the student as putting within his reach that which has hitherto cost him either several guineas or several Museum headaches. For only by studying the poems grouped and detached as they are in this volume can their full significance individually, and in a still greater degree collectively, be adequately recognized. Within a few years of 1798 they were altered in form and mixed up with many others, and even in the editions of 1800-5 are difficult of access; while, in the case of Wordsworth at least, whether in the poet's own elaborate and often puzzling classifications, or in the more modern chronological editions, the poems are dispersed in a highly distracting manner. The volume of 1798 is a whole, and must be studied as such, whether the aim be to understand Coleridge or Wordsworth individually, or the two men in their relations to each other, or the pair in their relations to a movement in our literature not indeed initiated by them, but to which they supplied the first commanding and controlling impulse and influence. The fact that Coleridge and Wordsworth was close companions during the period of the composition of most of the poems has been long known in a general way; but the full extent of the intimacy of their intercourse was first revealed by the publication of extracts from Dorothy Wordsworth's Alfoxden journal in Prof. Knight's life of her brother (vol. i. pp. 131-43). And this journal, with its continuation at the Lakes, brings into strong relief the portrait, hitherto somewhat hazy, of Dorothy herself, and the influence she must have exercised on both the poets. That she was a woman of very remarkable mind, character, attainments, and influence was known or suspected from the way in which her brother has written of her in prose and verse; but how remarkable were her powers will not be fully known until these journals have been studied closely. It will probably be found that almost all of Coleridge's and Wordsworth's best work was inspired, and in greater part executed, while the poets were in daily companionship with Dorothy; that in a very practical way she gave them eyes and ears; and it may be hardly too much to say that, alike by the Quantocks and by the Lakes, these three sate.

Side by side, full-summed in all their powers,
Dispensing harvest, sowing the To-be,
Self-reverent each and reverencing each,
Distinct in individualities,
But like each other ev'n as those who love.

Dorothy's strong points evidently were keen observation, rapid suggestion, and quick sympathy. She seems to have possessed these in greater degree than her brother, though not in so great degree as Coleridge. The influence of the two men on each other was strong and deep, but Coleridge's was by far the more active, as well as the finer and more penetrating; and the immense receptiveness of Wordsworth must have acted as a direct incitement to its exercise. The exercise was also a powerful stimulus to Coleridge's own genius, and if the direct product seems slight in bulk, the quality was almost unsurpassably fine, while much of its force must have passed into the work of his friend.

That the reception accorded to the Lyrical Ballads was not enthusiastic is not quite so surprising as it has been the fashion to suppose. The most surprising thing about it is, perhaps, that the anonymous little book was noticed by most of the critical organs then extant. These behaved very well, considering the shock they received from both the good and the bad in the book, and it is even to their credit that they were sensible of a shock, for it shows they were not dead, but only dozing. Nor must it be forgotten that there were verses not a few in the volume which even now try the most devout Wordsworthian; that Wordsworth himself had uneasy doubts about The Ancient Mariner, though he had none about ‘Goody Blake’; that even Southey and Lloyd were very unsound; that the judgment of the friendly Bristol circle was summed up in Mrs. Coleridge's report to Thomas Poole, “The Lyrical Ballads are not liked at all by any”; that, in short, no one seems to have really found salvation, save only Charles Lamb. The Monthly Magasine, which Coleridge called the “Aikinvoid,” and to which he had contributed many verses, had nothing to say but this:—

“The author of the Lyrical Ballads has attempted to imitate the style of our old English versifiers with unusual success; ‘The Auncient Mariners’ [sic], however, on which he particularly prides himself, is, in our opinion, a particular exception; some of his pieces are beautiful but others stiff and laboured.”

From this we gather that Dr. Aikin greatly preferred ‘Goody Blake’ to the Ancyent Marinere. The critic of the Monthly Review called the latter “the strangest story of a cock and a bull he ever saw on paper”; its drift he could not perceive, “unless the joke lay in depriving the wedding guest of his share of the feast”; but he allows that “there are in it poetical touches of an exquisite kind.” He quotes part of ‘The Nightingale’ with warm approval, and, winds up thus: “So much genius and originality are discovered in this publication that we wish to see another from the same hand, written on more elevated subjects and in a more cheerful disposition.” The Analytical Review devoted four pages to the little book, quoting largely from the ‘Preface,’ in which it found “something sensible”; but the reviewer thought The Ancient Mariner had in it “more of the extravagance of a mad German poet than of the simplicity of our ancient ballad-writers.” “Our young rhymsters and blankverse men,” he adds (with evident allusion to Lamb and Lloyd), who are given to melancholy, are contrasted with the author of ‘The Nightingale,’ the opening passage of which is quoted for their benefit; and while selecting for special approval and quotation ‘Goody Blake,’ the reviewer is “particularly pleased” with ‘The Thorn,’ ‘The Mad Mother,’ and ‘The Idiot Boy.’ Nobody has a word, good or bad, for the Tintern ‘Lines’—nobody, that is, besides Charles Lamb but Southey, who wrote admiringly and generously of the poem in the same Critical Review notice in which he called The Ancient Mariner “a Dutch attempt at German sublimity, in which genius has been employed in producing a poem of little merit.” And it was Southey alone who appears to have observed the ‘Lines left on a Yew-tree Seat,’ and nobody at all seems to have been attracted by the lines beginning ‘It is the first mild day of March,’ or those ‘Written in Early Spring,’ or the exquisite close of ‘Simon Lee,’ which shows how little the sweet influences of Cowper and Burns had up to that time affected the dry places of metropolitan criticism.

The sale of the volume was slow, but in a couple of years a fresh edition was printed, with an additional volume; in 1802, and again in 1805, the two volumes were reprinted, so that, all things considered, the Lyrical Ballads did not fare badly. Of the single volume of 1798 we know that five hundred copies were printed; it is improbable that of the two-volume editions of 1800 and 1802 the numbers were smaller; so that we arrive at a total sale of 2,500 volumes, at five shillings each, between 1798 and 1805, say in seven years; and this when the population of the United Kingdom was somewhere between a third and a half of its present numbers, and the proportion of readers vastly smaller, while the value of money was considerably greater than now. It would be within the mark to estimate that, all things considered, the 625l. spent by the public between 1798 and 1805 on the first three editions of the Lyrical Ballads would have to be quadrupled into 2,500l. to arrive at an equivalent for the present day. With these figures before them let our juvenile poets and their publishers decide whether the Lyrical Ballads were a commercial failure.

Prof. Dowden's first intention, “to record the results of a complete collation of the several texts” of the poems, was abandoned, he tells us, because “it became evident that such a body of notes would add too much to the bulk of the little volume.” The few examples given in the “Notes” whet the appetite for more. For instance, one would have been glad to have seen besides the rewritten passage in the ‘Yew-tree Seat’ the poet's wrestlings with the lines immediately following it:—

His only visitants a straggling sheep,
The stone-chat, or the glancing sand-piper;
And on these barren rocks with juniper,
And heath and thistle, thinly sprinkled o'er,
Fixing his downward eye. …

Thus the passage remained until 1815 (save that after 1798 the stranger's eye was “downcast”), when the second line was expanded into two, thus:—

The stone-chat, or the sand-lark, restless bird
Piping along the margin of the lake.

Later on the original line was restored, but the third and fourth were altered to

And on these barren rocks, with fern and heath
And juniper, and thistle sprinkled o'er,

and so happily the passage was finally left.

The numerous phases through which ‘The Female Vagrant’ passed before she appeared in her due setting in ‘Guilt and Sorrow’ (1842) are alluded to in passing by the editor, and he adds that in its first form the poem (‘Guilt and Sorrow’) must have given expression to much of the writer's youthful revolutionary sentiments. This supposition is warranted not only by Wordsworth's account of the time (1794) and circumstances under which the poem was composed, but also by at least one of the stanzas printed in 1798, and reprinted in 1800, but which was dropped for ever after. The vagrant woman has just arrived in America with her soldier-husband:—

Oh! dreadful price of being to resign
All that is dear in being! better far
In Want's most lonely cave till death to pine,
Unseen, unheard, unwatched by any star;
Or in the streets and walks where proud men are,
Better our dying bodies to obtrude,
Than dog-like, wading at the heels of war,
Protract a curst existence, with the brood
That lap (their very nourishment) their brothers' blood.

Another stanza, describing the horrors of a stormed city, lingered till 1805; and yet another, whose existence was cut short at the same point, and which is worth quoting. Although the words are put into the untutored mouth of the female vagrant, they must be held to express the young revolutionary poet's own tolerant musings on the life led by a band of thieving scamps, whose depredations were carried on under the guise of “rough potters, trading soberly [unlike Peter Bell] with panniered asses driven from door to door.” The stanza immediately preceded that now numbered xlvi. of ‘Guilt and Sorrow,’ and is quite as good as anything in the Anti-Jacobin:—

My heart is touched to think that men like these,
The rude earth's tenants, were my first relief:
How kindly did they paint their vagrant ease!
And their long holiday that feared not grief,
For all belonged to all, and each was chief.
No plough their sinews strained; on grating road
No wain they drove, and yet the yellow sheaf
In every vale for their delight was stowed:
For them, in Nature's meads, the milky udder flowed.

The alterations made in the text of ‘The Thorn’ are peculiarly interesting, if only for the occasion of most of them—Coleridge's criticisms in the fourth chapter of his Biographia Literaria (1817). He had before him Wordsworth's text of 1815, which was substantially that of 1798. Exception was taken to the foot-rule measurement of the muddy pond, and to part of the tenth and all of the five following stanzas, which were cruelly quoted in a footnote. Whether Wordsworth was grateful or not is unknown, but he was obedient, for the worst of the ineptitudes disappeared from future editions. They were partly balanced by the substitution of the stagey “grey-haired Wilfred of the Glen” for the more congruous “old Farmer Simpson.” For evidence that there existed an actual thorn in the vicinity of a muddy pond we have not to rely merely on the poet's ex parte deposition, for both are mentioned in Dorothy's Alfoxden journal, wherein she wrote under April 20th, 1798, “Walked in the evening up the hill dividing the Coombes. Came home the Crookham way, by the thorn and the little muddy pond.” And in the same journal we read that the 3rd of February, 1798, was “a mild morning, the windows open at breakfast”; that the party “walked with Coleridge over the hills”; and that “the red-breasts sang upon the leafless boughs”; and are inclined to suspect that the poet changed the month for a rhyme's sake, when he wrote:—

It is the first mild day of March,
Each minute sweeter than before,
The red-breast sings from the tall larch
That stands beside our door;

and invited Dorothy to “put on her woodland dress, and give the day to idleness,” and Coleridge to join him in dating “from to-day the opening of the year.” There can be no doubt about the identity of the “one red leaf, the last of its clan,” which dances in the first or Quantockian part of ‘Christabel,’ when we read Dorothy's entry for March 7th, how she (or they all) saw “one only leaf upon the top of the tree—the sole remaining leaf—dance round and round like a rag blown about by the wind.” (This, with one or two similar hints, was noted by Prof. Dowden in his admirable article on ‘Coleridge as a Poet’ in last September's Fortnightly.) On May 6th the Wordsworths walked in the evening with Coleridge to Stowey, and “heard the nightingale; and saw a glow-worm,” doubtless one of the many birds of “one low piping sound,” and one of the many glowworms in the shade which lighted up their love-torches, heard and seen in the company of the

                                                  most gentle maid
Who dwelleth in her hospitable home
Hard by the Castle, and at latest eve
(Ev'n like a Lady vow'd and dedicate
To something more than nature in the grove)
Glides through the pathways.

This is not the place proper to annotations of the Lyrical Ballads, but more than enough, perhaps, has been said to indicate the interest, biographical as well as literary, which a study of the texts may be made to yield.