IV
Two highly incongruous travellers, Mary Wollstonecraft and Dorothy Wordsworth, followed close upon each other’s footsteps. Mary was in Altona on the Elbe in 1795 with her baby; three years later Dorothy came there with her brother and Coleridge. Both kept a record of their travels; both saw the same places, but the eyes with which they saw them were very different. Whatever Mary saw served to start her mind upon some theory, upon the effect of government, upon the state of the people, upon the mystery of her own soul. The beat of the oars on the waves made her ask, “Life, what are you? Where goes this breath? This I so much alive? In what element will it mix, giving and receiving fresh energy?” And sometimes she forgot to look at the sunset and looked instead at the Baron Wolzogen. Dorothy, on the other hand, noted what was before her accurately, literally, and with prosaic precision. “The walk very pleasing between Hamburgh and Altona. A large piece of ground planted with trees, and intersected by gravel walks... . The ground on the opposite side of the Elbe appears marshy.” Dorothy never railed against “the cloven hoof of despotism”. Dorothy never asked “men’s questions” about exports and imports; Dorothy never confused her own soul with the sky. This “I so much alive” was ruthlessly subordinated to the trees and the grass. For if she let “I” and its rights and its wrongs and its passions and its suffering get between her and the object, she would be calling the moon “the Queen of the Night”; she would be talking of dawn’s “orient beams”; she would be soaring into reveries and rhapsodies and forgetting to find the exact phrase for the ripple of moonlight upon the lake. It was like “herrings in the water” – she could not have said that if she had been thinking about herself. So while Mary dashed her head against wall after wall, and cried out, “Surely something resides in this heart that is not perishable – and life is more than a dream”, Dorothy went on methodically at Alfoxden noting the approach of spring. “The sloe in blossom, the hawthorn green, the larches in the park changed from black to green, in two or three days.” And next day, 14th April 1798, “the evening very stormy, so we staid indoors. Mary Wollstonecraft’s life, &c., came.” And the day after they walked in the squire’s grounds and noticed that “Nature was very successfully striving to make beautiful what art had deformed – ruins, hermitages, &c., &c.”. There is no reference to Mary Wollstonecraft; it seems as if her life and all its storms had been swept away in one of those compendious et ceteras, and yet the next sentence reads like an unconscious comment. “Happily we cannot shape the huge hills, or carve out the valleys according to our fancy.” No, we cannot re-form, we must not rebel; we can only accept and try to understand the message of Nature. And so the notes go on.
Spring passed; summer came; summer turned to autumn; it was winter, and then again the sloes were in blossom and the hawthorns green and spring had come. But it was spring in the North now, and Dorothy was living alone with her brother in a small cottage at Grasmere in the midst of the hills. Now after the hardships and separations of youth they were together under their own roof; now they could address themselves undisturbed to the absorbing occupation of living in the heart of Nature and trying, day by day, to read her meaning. They had money enough at last to let them live together without the need of earning a penny. No family duties or professional tasks distracted them. Dorothy could ramble all day on the hills and sit up talking to Coleridge all night without being scolded by her aunt for unwomanly behaviour. The hours were theirs from sunrise to sunset, and could be altered to suit the season. If it was fine, there was no need to come in; if it was wet, there was no need to get up. One could go to bed at any hour. One could let the dinner cool if the cuckoo were shouting on the hill and William had not found the exact epithet he wanted. Sunday was a day like any other. Custom, convention, everything was subordinated to the absorbing, exacting, exhausting task of living in the heart of Nature and writing poetry. For exhausting it was. William would make his head ache in the effort to find the right word. He would go on hammering at a poem until Dorothy was afraid to suggest an alteration. A chance phrase of hers would run in his head and make it impossible for him to get back into the proper mood. He would come down to breakfast and sit “with his shirt neck unbuttoned, and his waistcoat open”, writing a poem on a Butterfly which some story of hers had suggested, and he would eat nothing, and then he would begin altering the poem and again would be exhausted.
It is strange how vividly all this is brought before us, considering that the diary is made up of brief notes such as any quiet woman might make of her garden’s changes and her brother’s moods and the progress of the seasons. It was warm and mild, she notes, after a day of rain. She met a cow in a field. “The cow looked at me, and I looked at the cow, and whenever I stirred the cow gave over eating.” She met an old man who walked with two sticks – for days on end she met nothing more out of the way than a cow eating and an old man walking. And her motives for writing are common enough – “because I will not quarrel with myself, and because I shall give William pleasure by it when he comes home again”. It is only gradually that the difference between this rough notebook and others discloses itself; only by degrees that the brief notes unfurl in the mind and open a whole landscape before us, that the plain statement proves to be aimed so directly at the object that if we look exactly along the line that it points we shall see precisely what she saw. “The moonlight lay upon the hills like snow.” “The air was become still, the lake of a bright slate colour, the hills darkening. The bays shot into the low fading shores. Sheep resting. All things quiet.” “There was no one waterfall above another – it was the sound of waters in the air – the voice of the air.” Even in such brief notes one feels the suggestive power which is the gift of the poet rather than of the naturalist, the power which, taking only the simplest facts, so orders them that the whole scene comes before us, heightened and composed, the lake in its quiet, the hills in their splendour. Yet she was no descriptive writer in the usual sense. Her first concern was to be truthful – grace and symmetry must be made subordinate to truth. But then truth is sought because to falsify the look of the stir of the breeze on the lake is to tamper with the spirit which inspires appearances. It is that spirit which goads her and urges her and keeps her faculties for ever on the stretch. A sight or a sound would not let her be till she had traced her perception along its course and fixed it in words, though they might be bald, or in an image, though it might be angular. Nature was a stern taskmistress. The exact prosaic detail must be rendered as well as the vast and visionary outline. Even when the distant hills trembled before her in the glory of a dream she must note with literal accuracy “the glittering silver line on the ridge of the backs of the sheep”, or remark how “the crows at a little distance from us became white as silver as they flew in the sunshine, and when they went still further, they looked like shapes of water passing over the green fields”. Always trained and in use, her powers of observation became in time so expert and so acute that a day’s walk stored her mind’s eye with a vast assembly of curious objects to be sorted at leisure. How strange the sheep looked mixed with the soldiers at Dumbarton Castle! For some reason the sheep looked their real size, but the soldiers looked like puppets. And then the movements of the sheep were so natural and fearless, and the motion of the dwarf soldiers was so restless and apparently without meaning. It was extremely queer. Or lying in bed she would look up at the ceiling and think how the varnished beams were “as glossy as black rocks on a sunny day cased in ice”. Yes, they crossed each other in almost as intricate and fantastic a manner as I have seen the underboughs of a large beech-tree withered by the depth of the shade above.... It was like what I should suppose an underground cave or temple to be, with a dripping or moist roof, and the moonlight entering in upon it by some means or other, and yet the colours were more like melted gems. I lay looking up till the light of the fire faded away.... I did not sleep much.