# Stories after Nature/Preface

PREFACE.
O early as 1817, the date given by Mr. Buxton Forman, a sonnet by Keats was addressed "to a friend who sent me some roses," and in the sonnet the name given was Wells. This sonnet, writes Mr. Swinburne, "remains almost the only indication extant, unless the two or three yet fainter references to be found in the published correspondence of Keats be admitted as further evidence," of the personality of the author of Stories after Nature and the drama of Joseph and his Brethren.
The flower-present seems to indicate close friendship or companionship between Keats and Wells. Independently of this, I know ​not how I became impressed with the idea that the two were intimate, and so closely associated that the drama was written in a sort of rivalry and proud feeling of competition with Keats. I may have learned something of this from two other poets, R. H. Horne and Thomas Wade, with both of whom in young days I was well acquainted (Wade indeed my brother-in-law). These two, Horne and Wade, like Wells, and like Reynolds and Darley and Beddoes and W. B. Scott and others, yet stand among the "inheritors of unfulfilled renown." Wade was the author of a considerable volume of poems, Mundi et Cordis Carmina, published in 1835; and in 1837 Moxon brought out, as the beginning of an intended new volume, a sheet of fourteen verse-pages, the Contention of Death and Love, in which I again found the name of Wells—
"Whose genius sleeps for his applause,"
with the following note:
"The name of Wells illustrates this Lyric. ​That it should be needful here to state that Mr. Wells is the author of a great poem in the dramatic form, entitled Joseph and his Brethren, and published many years since, is a disgrace to our best and leading reviewers . . . . . . Of the noble poem of Mr. Wells one personally but a stranger to him can say, with a fervid conviction of the truth of his assertion, that to go from the Paradise Lost, the Samson Agonistes, the Antony and Cleopatra, to not few passages and scenes of Joseph and his Brethren, is but to sail in spirit down one and the same stream of sublime, subtle, and unsurpassed poetry."
So I came to know of Charles Wells. Here however of Joseph and his Brethren I have not to speak, and Mr. Swinburne's prefatory note, to the reprint of the drama in 1876, leaves no occasion for words of supplementary admiration. My business is with the Stories after Nature, a more important book than is suggested by Mr. Swinburne's description of it as "a puny ​volume, barely heavier than a pamphlet," for although in small 12mo, it occupies no fewer than two hundred and fifty-one pages. This volume, published anonymously in 1822 (the year after Keats' death) by T. and J. Allman, Princes Street, Hanover Square, and C. and J. Ollier, Vere Street, Oxford Street, I picked off a book-stall nearly fifty years ago, in 1842, the only copy I have ever seen. Certainly I had found a treasure, which, shown to others, not I alone appreciated and admired. Dante Rossetti, to whom I lent it, was minded to illustrate some of the Stories, to be engraved by me for a promised reprint, an intention which we had not the fortune to carry out. Rossetti, I believe, brought the book to the notice of Swinburne, whose criticism (not all, I think, acceptable), in the prefatory note already referred to, is worthy of attention, and quoting at some length. He writes:
"The first publication of Mr. Wells, written, it is said, in his earliest youth, has ​much of the charm and something of the weakness natural to the first note of a songbird whose wings have yet to grow and whose notes have yet to deepen; yet in its first flutterings and twitterings there is a nameless grace, a beauty undefinable, which belongs only to the infancy of genius as it belongs only to the infancy of life. To a reader of the age at which this book was written it will seem—or so at least it seemed to me—'perfect in grace and power, tender and exquisite in choice of language, full of a noble and masculine delicacy in feeling and purpose'; and he will be ready to attribute the utter neglect which has befallen it simply 'to the imbecile caprice of hazard and opinion.' Even then, however, he will perceive, if there be in him any critical judgment or any promise of such faculty to come, that the style of these stories is too near poetry to be really praiseworthy as prose; that they halt between two kinds of merit. At times they will seem to him almost to attain the ​standard of the Decameron; yet even he will remark that they want the direct aim and clear comprehension of story which are never wanting in Boccacio . . . . And the youngest reader will probably take note that 'there is a savour of impossibility (so to speak), a sort of incongruous beauty dividing the subject and the style, which removes the Stories after Nature from our complete apprehension, and baffles the reader's delight in them;' that 'even the license of a fairy tale is here abruptly leapt over; names and places are thrust in which perplex the very readiest belief even of that factitious kind which we may accord to things practically impossible: English kings and Tuscan dukes occupy the place reserved in the charity of our imaginations for kings of Lyonesse and princesses of Garba; the language also is often cast in the mould of Elizabethan convention; absolute Euphuism, with all its fantastic corruption of style, breaks out and runs rampant here and there; especially in a few of ​the more passionate speeches, this starched ugliness of ruff and rebato will be felt to stiffen and deform the style of the same page which contains some of the sweetest and purest English ever written.' On taking up the little book again in after years, he will also discern the perceptible influence of Leigh Hunt in some of the stories." . . .
There is much truth in this criticism, though it seems strange for a poet to object to poetic prose which, however youthful, is choice and dignified, a not unworthy setting of the nobility of thought and feeling which characterises the whole book. One may also forgive the occasional Euphuism for sake of the earnestness and real passion. Shakspere himself will not escape rebuke if the charity of our imaginations cannot tolerate Wells' English kings and Tuscan dukes in the place of "kings of Lyonesse and princesses of Garba." We do not quarrel with the sea-coast of Bohemia, nor mind anachronisms in Cymbeline or a Win​ter's Tale; nor are we much shocked at even the absurdities of the Gesta Romanorum. I have again read these delightful Stories, nearly fifty years since my first reading of them; and I own to reading them with the same pleasure and admiration as at first, finding them, notwithstanding their youthfulness and inequalities, true Stories after Nature, sincerely natural, fraught with Nature's own simple truth and most healthful teaching. As Mr. Swinburne further remarks in a too depreciatory tone, Leigh Hunt's influence may be seen; but I think that most generous of critics would not have set any of them down as "somewhat thin and empty," but have rejoiced in their fresh luxuriance, and recognized in the writer a worthy follower and comrade. Strange indeed it seems that he, so wide and so appreciative a reader, the friend also of Keats, has not, that I can recollect, anywhere expressed even an opinion of Wells' prose or poetry!
In 1845 I was engaged on two magazines, ​illustrated and of similar literary character—the Illustrated Family Journal and the Illuminated Magazine, of which last I succeeded to Douglas Jerrold as editor. I could find no better material, whether as stories or as fit for illustration, than these Stories so lately come into my possession; and I printed some seven or eight of them, with designs by the younger Pickersgill. I think it was through the son of Hazlitt (the critic and essayist) that these reprints came to the knowledge of Wells, then living idly in Brittany. He wrote to thank me, and sent me in manuscript two other tales that had not been printed: Claribel (here added to the 1822 series), which I was very glad to use, and a second, which seemed to me not suitable for the magazine, and which I returned to him. I have always been sorry for not having printed it, it was so powerfully written: a ghastly tale of revenge, the revenge of a man who, trapping his wife with a lover, fastened them into their room and left them to starve, years afterward ​unsealing the room that he might look upon their remains.
Once I saw Wells. He was for a few days in London, and came to see me at Woodford, on Hainault Forest edge, where I then lived. There were two coaches to Woodford for the eight miles from town. By the first, one Sunday morning, came David Scott, the great Scottish painter, the brother of my life-long friend William Bell Scott, so lately dead; by the second came an unexpected visitor, a stranger, a small weather-worn, wiry man, looking like a sportsman or fox-hunter. This was Charles Wells. He had been a great sportsman during a residence of many years in the north of France. The two men spent the day with me, a notable day for me with two such guests, both so remarkable, and so widely unlike. I think I heard some years after that of Wells having joined the Romanist Church and being spoken of as a mesmerist or some sort of miracle performer; and then of his going to live with a ​son, an engineer at Marseilles, where, I believe, he died.
I may perhaps be allowed to close my prefatory gossip with the not often quoted sonnet by Keats, to the friend who sent him roses: