No More Learning

Now these essential prejudices are all reducible to the one fundamental
presumption, THAT THERE EXIST THINGS WITHOUT US. As this on the one hand
originates, neither in grounds nor arguments, and yet on the other hand
remains proof against all attempts to remove it by grounds or arguments
(naturam furca expellas tamen usque redibit;) on the one hand lays
claim to IMMEDIATE certainty as a position at once indemonstrable
and irresistible, and yet on the other hand, inasmuch as it refers to
something essentially different from ourselves, nay even in opposition
to ourselves, leaves it inconceivable how it could possibly become a
part of our immediate consciousness; (in other words how that, which
ex hypothesi is and continues to be extrinsic and alien to our being,
should become a modification of our being) the philosopher therefore
compels himself to treat this faith as nothing more than a prejudice,
innate indeed and connatural, but still a prejudice.

The other position, which not only claims but necessitates the admission
of its immediate certainty, equally for the scientific reason of the
philosopher as for the common sense of mankind at large, namely, I AM,
cannot so properly be entitled a prejudice. It is groundless indeed; but
then in the very idea it precludes all ground, and separated from
the immediate consciousness loses its whole sense and import. It is
groundless; but only because it is itself the ground of all other
certainty. Now the apparent contradiction, that the former position,
namely, the existence of things without us, which from its nature
cannot be immediately certain, should be received as blindly and as
independently of all grounds as the existence of our own being, the
Transcendental philosopher can solve only by the supposition, that the
former is unconsciously involved in the latter; that it is not only
coherent but identical, and one and the same thing with our own
immediate self consciousness. To demonstrate this identity is the office
and object of his philosophy.

If it be said, that this is idealism, let it be remembered that it
is only so far idealism, as it is at the same time, and on that very
account, the truest and most binding realism. For wherein does the
realism of mankind properly consist? In the assertion that there exists
a something without them, what, or how, or where they know not, which
occasions the objects of their perception? Oh no! This is neither
connatural nor universal. It is what a few have taught and learned
in the schools, and which the many repeat without asking themselves
concerning their own meaning. The realism common to all mankind is far
elder and lies infinitely deeper than this hypothetical explanation
of the origin of our perceptions, an explanation skimmed from the mere
surface of mechanical philosophy. It is the table itself, which the man
of common sense believes himself to see, not the phantom of a table,
from which he may argumentatively deduce the reality of a table, which
he does not see. If to destroy the reality of all, that we actually
behold, be idealism, what can be more egregiously so, than the system of
modern metaphysics, which banishes us to a land of shadows, surrounds
us with apparitions, and distinguishes truth from illusion only by the
majority of those who dream the same dream? "I asserted that the world
was mad," exclaimed poor Lee, "and the world said, that I was mad, and
confound them, they outvoted me. "

It is to the true and original realism, that I would direct the
attention. This believes and requires neither more nor less, than the
object which it beholds or presents to itself, is the real and very
object. In this sense, however much we may strive against it, we are all
collectively born idealists, and therefore and only therefore are we at
the same time realists. But of this the philosophers of the schools know
nothing, or despise the faith as the prejudice of the ignorant vulgar,
because they live and move in a crowd of phrases and notions from which
human nature has long ago vanished. Oh, ye that reverence yourselves,
and walk humbly with the divinity in your own hearts, ye are worthy of a
better philosophy! Let the dead bury the dead, but do you preserve your
human nature, the depth of which was never yet fathomed by a philosophy
made up of notions and mere logical entities.

In the third treatise of my Logosophia, announced at the end of this
volume, I shall give (Deo volente) the demonstrations and constructions
of the Dynamic Philosophy scientifically arranged. It is, according
to my conviction, no other than the system of Pythagoras and of Plato
revived and purified from impure mixtures. Doctrina per tot manus
tradita tandem in vappam desiit! The science of arithmetic furnishes
instances, that a rule may be useful in practical application, and for
the particular purpose may be sufficiently authenticated by the result,
before it has itself been fully demonstrated. It is enough, if only it
be rendered intelligible. This will, I trust, have been effected in the
following Theses for those of my readers, who are willing to accompany
me through the following chapter, in which the results will be applied
to the deduction of the Imagination, and with it the principles of
production and of genial criticism in the fine arts.

THESIS I

Truth is correlative to being. Knowledge without a correspondent reality
is no knowledge; if we know, there must be somewhat known by us. To know
is in its very essence a verb active.

THESIS II

All truth is either mediate, that is, derived from some other truth
or truths; or immediate and original. The latter is absolute, and its
formula A. A. ; the former is of dependent or conditional certainty, and
represented in the formula B. A. The certainty, which adheres in A, is
attributable to B.

SCHOLIUM. A chain without a staple, from which all the links derived
their stability, or a series without a first, has been not inaptly
allegorized, as a string of blind men, each holding the skirt of the man
before him, reaching far out of sight, but all moving without the least
deviation in one straight line. It would be naturally taken for
granted, that there was a guide at the head of the file: what if it were
answered, No! Sir, the men are without number, and infinite blindness
supplies the place of sight?

Equally inconceivable is a cycle of equal truths without a common and
central principle, which prescribes to each its proper sphere in the
system of science. That the absurdity does not so immediately strike us,
that it does not seem equally unimaginable, is owing to a surreptitious
act of the imagination, which, instinctively and without our noticing
the same, not only fills up the intervening spaces, and contemplates the
cycle (of B. C. D. E. F. etc. ) as a continuous circle (A. ) giving to all
collectively the unity of their common orbit; but likewise supplies,
by a sort of subintelligitur, the one central power, which renders the
movement harmonious and cyclical.

THESIS III

We are to seek therefore for some absolute truth capable of
communicating to other positions a certainty, which it has not itself
borrowed; a truth self-grounded, unconditional and known by its own
light. In short, we have to find a somewhat which is, simply because it
is. In order to be such, it must be one which is its own predicate,
so far at least that all other nominal predicates must be modes and
repetitions of itself. Its existence too must be such, as to preclude
the possibility of requiring a cause or antecedent without an absurdity.

THESIS IV

That there can be but one such principle, may be proved a priori; for
were there two or more, each must refer to some other, by which its
equality is affirmed; consequently neither would be self-established,
as the hypothesis demands. And a posteriori, it will be proved by
the principle itself when it is discovered, as involving universal
antecedence in its very conception.

SCHOLIUM. If we affirm of a board that it is blue, the predicate (blue)
is accidental, and not implied in the subject, board. If we affirm of
a circle that it is equi-radial, the predicate indeed is implied in the
definition of the subject; but the existence of the subject itself
is contingent, and supposes both a cause and a percipient. The same
reasoning will apply to the indefinite number of supposed indemonstrable
truths exempted from the profane approach of philosophic investigation
by the amiable Beattie, and other less eloquent and not more profound
inaugurators of common sense on the throne of philosophy; a fruitless
attempt, were it only that it is the two-fold function of philosophy
to reconcile reason with common sense, and to elevate common sense into
reason.

THESIS V

Such a principle cannot be any THING or OBJECT. Each thing is what it is
in consequence of some other thing. An infinite, independent [52]
thing, is no less a contradiction, than an infinite circle or a sideless
triangle. Besides a thing is that, which is capable of being an object
which itself is not the sole percipient. But an object is inconceivable
without a subject as its antithesis. Omne perceptum percipientem
supponit.

But neither can the principle be found in a subject as a subject,
contra-distinguished from an object: for unicuique percipienti aliquid
objicitur perceptum. It is to be found therefore neither in object
nor subject taken separately, and consequently, as no other third is
conceivable, it must be found in that which is neither subject nor
object exclusively, but which is the identity of both.

THESIS VI

This principle, and so characterised manifests itself in the SUM or
I AM; which I shall hereafter indiscriminately express by the words
spirit, self, and self-consciousness. In this, and in this alone,
object and subject, being and knowing, are identical, each involving
and supposing the other. In other words, it is a subject which becomes
a subject by the act of constructing itself objectively to itself; but
which never is an object except for itself, and only so far as by the
very same act it becomes a subject. It may be described therefore as
a perpetual self-duplication of one and the same power into object and
subject, which presuppose each other, and can exist only as antitheses.

SCHOLIUM. If a man be asked how he knows that he is? he can only answer,
sum quia sum. But if (the absoluteness of this certainty having been
admitted) he be again asked, how he, the individual person, came to be,
then in relation to the ground of his existence, not to the ground of
his knowledge of that existence, he might reply, sum quia Deus est, or
still more philosophically, sum quia in Deo sum.

But if we elevate our conception to the absolute self, the great eternal
I AM, then the principle of being, and of knowledge, of idea, and of
reality; the ground of existence, and the ground of the knowledge of
existence, are absolutely identical, Sum quia sum [53]; I am, because I
affirm myself to be; I affirm myself to be, because I am.

THESIS VII

If then I know myself only through myself, it is contradictory to
require any other predicate of self, but that of self-consciousness.
Only in the self-consciousness of a spirit is there the required
identity of object and of representation; for herein consists the
essence of a spirit, that it is self-representative. If therefore this
be the one only immediate truth, in the certainty of which the reality
of our collective knowledge is grounded, it must follow that the spirit
in all the objects which it views, views only itself. If this could
be proved, the immediate reality of all intuitive knowledge would be
assured. It has been shown, that a spirit is that, which is its own
object, yet not originally an object, but an absolute subject for which
all, itself included, may become an object. It must therefore be an ACT;
for every object is, as an object, dead, fixed, incapable in itself of
any action, and necessarily finite. Again the spirit (originally
the identity of object and subject) must in some sense dissolve this
identity, in order to be conscious of it; fit alter et idem. But
this implies an act, and it follows therefore that intelligence
or self-consciousness is impossible, except by and in a will. The
self-conscious spirit therefore is a will; and freedom must be assumed
as a ground of philosophy, and can never be deduced from it.

THESIS VIII

Whatever in its origin is objective, is likewise as such necessarily
finite. Therefore, since the spirit is not originally an object, and
as the subject exists in antithesis to an object, the spirit cannot
originally be finite. But neither can it be a subject without becoming
an object, and, as it is originally the identity of both, it can be
conceived neither as infinite nor finite exclusively, but as the most
original union of both. In the existence, in the reconciling, and the
recurrence of this contradiction consists the process and mystery of
production and life.

THESIS IX

This principium commune essendi et cognoscendi, as subsisting in a WILL,
or primary ACT of self-duplication, is the mediate or indirect principle
of every science; but it is the immediate and direct principle of the
ultimate science alone, i. e. of transcendental philosophy alone. For it
must be remembered, that all these Theses refer solely to one of the
two Polar Sciences, namely, to that which commences with, and rigidly
confines itself within, the subjective, leaving the objective (as far
as it is exclusively objective) to natural philosophy, which is its
opposite pole. In its very idea therefore as a systematic knowledge of
our collective KNOWING, (scientia scientiae) it involves the necessity
of some one highest principle of knowing, as at once the source and
accompanying form in all particular acts of intellect and perception.
This, it has been shown, can be found only in the act and evolution of
self-consciousness. We are not investigating an absolute principium
essendi; for then, I admit, many valid objections might be started
against our theory; but an absolute principium cognoscendi. The result
of both the sciences, or their equatorial point, would be the principle
of a total and undivided philosophy, as, for prudential reasons, I
have chosen to anticipate in the Scholium to Thesis VI and the note
subjoined. In other words, philosophy would pass into religion, and
religion become inclusive of philosophy. We begin with the I KNOW
MYSELF, in order to end with the absolute I AM. We proceed from the
SELF, in order to lose and find all self in GOD.

THESIS X

The transcendental philosopher does not inquire, what ultimate ground of
our knowledge there may lie out of our knowing, but what is the last in
our knowing itself, beyond which we cannot pass. The principle of our
knowing is sought within the sphere of our knowing. It must be some
thing therefore, which can itself be known. It is asserted only, that
the act of self-consciousness is for us the source and principle of
all our possible knowledge. Whether abstracted from us there exists any
thing higher and beyond this primary self-knowing, which is for us the
form of all our knowing must be decided by the result.

That the self-consciousness is the fixed point, to which for us all
is mortised and annexed, needs no further proof. But that the self-
consciousness may be the modification of a higher form of being, perhaps
of a higher consciousness, and this again of a yet higher, and so on in
an infinite regressus; in short, that self-consciousness may be
itself something explicable into something, which must lie beyond
the possibility of our knowledge, because the whole synthesis of our
intelligence is first formed in and through the self-consciousness,
does not at all concern us as transcendental philosophers. For to us,
self-consciousness is not a kind of being, but a kind of knowing, and
that too the highest and farthest that exists for us. It may however be
shown, and has in part already been shown earlier, that even when the
Objective is assumed as the first, we yet can never pass beyond the
principle of self-consciousness. Should we attempt it, we must be driven
back from ground to ground, each of which would cease to be a ground the
moment we pressed on it. We must be whirled down the gulf of an infinite
series. But this would make our reason baffle the end and purpose of
all reason, namely, unity and system. Or we must break off the series
arbitrarily, and affirm an absolute something that is in and of itself
at once cause and effect (causa sui), subject and object, or rather the
absolute identity of both. But as this is inconceivable, except in a
self-consciousness, it follows, that even as natural philosophers
we must arrive at the same principle from which as transcendental
philosophers we set out; that is, in a self-consciousness in which the
principium essendi does not stand to the principlum cognoscende in
the relation of cause to effect, but both the one and the other are
co-inherent and identical. Thus the true system of natural philosophy
places the sole reality of things in an ABSOLUTE, which is at once
causa sui et effectus, pataer autopator, uios heautou--in the absolute
identity of subject and object, which it calls nature, and which in its
highest power is nothing else than self-conscious will or intelligence.
In this sense the position of Malebranche, that we see all things in
God, is a strict philosophical truth; and equally true is the assertion
of Hobbes, of Hartley, and of their masters in ancient Greece, that all
real knowledge supposes a prior sensation. For sensation itself is but
vision nascent, not the cause of intelligence, but intelligence itself
revealed as an earlier power in the process of self-construction.

Makar, ilathi moi;
Pater, ilathi moi
Ei para kosmon,
Ei para moiran
Ton son ethigon!

Bearing then this in mind, that intelligence is a self-development, not
a quality supervening to a substance, we may abstract from all degree,
and for the purpose of philosophic construction reduce it to kind, under
the idea of an indestructible power with two opposite and counteracting
forces, which by a metaphor borrowed from astronomy, we may call the
centrifugal and centripetal forces. The intelligence in the one tends to
objectize itself, and in the other to know itself in the object. It
will be hereafter my business to construct by a series of intuitions
the progressive schemes, that must follow from such a power with such
forces, till I arrive at the fulness of the human intelligence. For
my present purpose, I assume such a power as my principle, in order to
deduce from it a faculty, the generation, agency, and application of
which form the contents of the ensuing chapter.

In a preceding page I have justified the use of technical terms in
philosophy, whenever they tend to preclude confusion of thought, and
when they assist the memory by the exclusive singleness of their meaning
more than they may, for a short time, bewilder the attention by their
strangeness. I trust, that I have not extended this privilege beyond
the grounds on which I have claimed it; namely, the conveniency of the
scholastic phrase to distinguish the kind from all degrees, or rather
to express the kind with the abstraction of degree, as for instance
multeity instead of multitude; or secondly, for the sake of
correspondence in sound in interdependent or antithetical terms, as
subject and object; or lastly, to avoid the wearying recurrence of
circumlocutions and definitions. Thus I shall venture to use potence,
in order to express a specific degree of a power, in imitation of the
Algebraists. I have even hazarded the new verb potenziate, with its
derivatives, in order to express the combination or transfer of powers.
It is with new or unusual terms, as with privileges in courts of justice
or legislature; there can be no legitimate privilege, where there
already exists a positive law adequate to the purpose; and when there is
no law in existence, the privilege is to be justified by its accordance
with the end, or final cause, of all law. Unusual and new-coined
words are doubtless an evil; but vagueness, confusion, and imperfect
conveyance of our thoughts, are a far greater. Every system, which is
under the necessity of using terms not familiarized by the metaphysics
in fashion, will be described as written in an unintelligible style, and
the author must expect the charge of having substituted learned jargon
for clear conception; while, according to the creed of our modern
philosophers, nothing is deemed a clear conception, but what is
representable by a distinct image. Thus the conceivable is reduced
within the bounds of the picturable. Hinc patet, qui fiat, ut cum
irrepraesentabile et impossibile vulgo ejusdem significatus habeantur,
conceptus tam continui, quam infiniti, a plurimis rejiciantur, quippe
quorum, secundum leges cognitionis intuitivae, repraesentatio est
impossibilis. Quanquam autem harum e non paucis scholis explosarum
notionum, praesertim prioris, causam hic non gero, maximi tamen
momendi erit monuisse. gravissimo illos errore labi, qui tam perverse
argumentandi ratione utuntur. Quicquid enim repugnat legibus intellectus
et rationis, utique est impossibile; quod autem, cum rationis purae
sit objectum, legibus cognitionis intuitivae tantummodo non subest, non
item. Nam hic dissensus inter facultatem sensitivam et intellectualem,
(quarum indolem mox exponam,) nihil indigitat, nisi, quas mens ab
intellectu acceptas fert ideas abstractas, illas in concreto exsequi
et in intuitus commutare saepenumero non posse. Haec autem reluctantia
subjectiva mentitur, ut plurimum, repugnantiam aliquam objectivam, et
incautos facile fallit, limitibus, quibus mens humana circumscribitur,
pro iis habitis, quibus ipsa rerum essentia continetur. [54]

Critics, who are most ready to bring this charge of pedantry and
unintelligibility, are the most apt to overlook the important
fact, that, besides the language of words, there is a language of
spirits--(sermo interior)--and that the former is only the vehicle of
the latter. Consequently their assurance, that they do not understand
the philosophic writer, instead of proving any thing against the
philosophy, may furnish an equal, and (caeteris paribus) even a stronger
presumption against their own philosophic talent.

Great indeed are the obstacles which an English metaphysician has to
encounter. Amongst his most respectable and intelligent judges, there
will be many who have devoted their attention exclusively to the
concerns and interests of human life, and who bring with them to
the perusal of a philosophic system an habitual aversion to all
speculations, the utility and application of which are not evident
and immediate. To these I would in the first instance merely oppose an
authority, which they themselves hold venerable, that of Lord Bacon: non
inutiles Scientiae existimandae sunt, quarum in se nullus est usus, si
ingenia acuant et ordinent.

There are others, whose prejudices are still more formidable, inasmuch
as they are grounded in their moral feelings and religious principles,
which had been alarmed and shocked by the impious and pernicious tenets
defended by Hume, Priestley, and the French fatalists or necessitarians;
some of whom had perverted metaphysical reasonings to the denial of the
mysteries and indeed of all the peculiar doctrines of Christianity;
and others even to the subversion of all distinction between right
and wrong. I would request such men to consider what an eminent and
successful defender of the Christian faith has observed, that true
metaphysics are nothing else but true divinity, and that in fact the
writers, who have given them such just offence, were sophists, who had
taken advantage of the general neglect into which the science of logic
has unhappily fallen, rather than metaphysicians, a name indeed which
those writers were the first to explode as unmeaning. Secondly, I would
remind them, that as long as there are men in the world to whom the
Gnothi seauton is an instinct and a command from their own nature, so
long will there be metaphysicians and metaphysical speculations; that
false metaphysics can be effectually counteracted by true metaphysics
alone; and that if the reasoning be clear, solid and pertinent, the
truth deduced can never be the less valuable on account of the depth
from which it may have been drawn.

A third class profess themselves friendly to metaphysics, and believe
that they are themselves metaphysicians. They have no objection to
system or terminology, provided it be the method and the nomenclature
to which they have been familiarized in the writings of Locke, Hume,
Hartley, Condillac, or perhaps Dr. Reid, and Professor Stewart. To
objections from this cause, it is a sufficient answer, that one main
object of my attempt was to demonstrate the vagueness or insufficiency
of the terms used in the metaphysical schools of France and Great
Britain since the revolution, and that the errors which I propose to
attack cannot subsist, except as they are concealed behind the mask of a
plausible and indefinite nomenclature.

But the worst and widest impediment still remains. It is the
predominance of a popular philosophy, at once the counterfeit and the
mortal enemy of all true and manly metaphysical research. It is that
corruption, introduced by certain immethodical aphorisming eclectics,
who, dismissing not only all system, but all logical connection, pick
and choose whatever is most plausible and showy; who select, whatever
words can have some semblance of sense attached to them without the
least expenditure of thought; in short whatever may enable men to talk
of what they do not understand, with a careful avoidance of every thing
that might awaken them to a moment's suspicion of their ignorance. This
alas! is an irremediable disease, for it brings with it, not so much an
indisposition to any particular system, but an utter loss of taste and
faculty for all system and for all philosophy. Like echoes that beget
each other amongst the mountains, the praise or blame of such men
rolls in volleys long after the report from the original blunderbuss.
Sequacitas est potius et coitio quam consensus: et tamen (quod pessimum
est) pusillanimitas ista non sine arrogantia et fastidio se offert. [55]

I shall now proceed to the nature and genesis of the Imagination; but I
must first take leave to notice, that after a more accurate perusal of
Mr. Wordsworth's remarks on the Imagination, in his preface to the new
edition of his poems, I find that my conclusions are not so consentient
with his as, I confess, I had taken for granted. In an article
contributed by me to Mr. Southey's Omniana, On the soul and its organs
of sense, are the following sentences. "These (the human faculties) I
would arrange under the different senses and powers: as the eye, the
ear, the touch, etc. ; the imitative power, voluntary and automatic;
the imagination, or shaping and modifying power; the fancy, or the
aggregative and associative power; the understanding, or the regulative,
substantiating and realizing power; the speculative reason, vis
theoretica et scientifica, or the power by which we produce or aim to
produce unity, necessity, and universality in all our knowledge by means
of principles a priori [56]; the will, or practical reason; the faculty
of choice (Germanice, Willkuehr) and (distinct both from the moral will
and the choice,) the sensation of volition, which I have found reason to
include under the head of single and double touch. " To this, as far as
it relates to the subject in question, namely the words (the aggregative
and associative power) Mr. Wordsworth's "objection is only that the
definition is too general. To aggregate and to associate, to evoke and
to combine, belong as well to the Imagination as to the Fancy. " I reply,
that if, by the power of evoking and combining, Mr. Wordsworth means the
same as, and no more than, I meant by the aggregative and associative,
I continue to deny, that it belongs at all to the Imagination; and I
am disposed to conjecture, that he has mistaken the copresence of Fancy
with Imagination for the operation of the latter singly. A man may work
with two very different tools at the same moment; each has its share in
the work, but the work effected by each is distinct and different. But
it will probably appear in the next chapter, that deeming it necessary
to go back much further than Mr. Wordsworth's subject required or
permitted, I have attached a meaning to both Fancy and Imagination,
which he had not in view, at least while he was writing that preface. He
will judge. Would to Heaven, I might meet with many such readers! I will
conclude with the words of Bishop Jeremy Taylor: "He to whom all things
are one, who draweth all things to one, and seeth all things in one, may
enjoy true peace and rest of spirit. " [57]




CHAPTER XIII

On the imagination, or esemplastic power


O Adam, One Almighty is, from whom
All things proceed, and up to him return,
If not deprav'd from good, created all
Such to perfection, one first matter all,
Endued with various forms, various degrees
Of substance, and, in things that live, of life;
But more refin'd, more spiritous and pure,
As nearer to him plac'd, or nearer tending,
Each in their several active spheres assigu'd,
Till body up to spirit work, in bounds
Proportion'd to each kind. So from the root
Springs lighter the green stalk, from thence the leaves
More aery: last the bright consummate flower
Spirits odorous breathes: flowers and their fruit,
Man's nourishment, by gradual scale sublim'd,
To vital spirits aspire: to animal:
To intellectual! --give both life and sense,
Fancy and understanding; whence the soul
REASON receives, and reason is her being,
Discursive or intuitive. [58]

"Sane dicerentur si res corporales nil nisi materiale continerent,
verissime in fluxu consistere, neque habere substantiale quicquam,
quemadmodum et Platonici olim recte agnovere. "

"Hinc igitur, praeter pure mathematica et phantasiae subjecta, collegi
quaedam metaphysica solaque mente perceptibilia, esse admittenda et
massae materiali principium quoddam superius et, ut sic dicam, formale
addendum: quandoquidem omnes veritates rerum corporearum ex solis
axiomatibus logisticis et geometricis, nempe de magno et parvo, toto
et parte, figura et situ, colligi non possint; sed alia de causa et
effectu, actioneque et passione, accedere debeant, quibus ordinis
rerum rationes salventur. Id principium rerum, an entelecheian an vim
appellemus, non refert, modo meminerimus, per solam Virium notionem
intelligibiliter explicari. " [59]

Sebomai noeron
Kruphian taxin
Chorei TI MESON
Ou katachuthen. [60]


Des Cartes, speaking as a naturalist, and in imitation of Archimedes,
said, give me matter and motion and I will construct you the universe.
We must of course understand him to have meant; I will render the
construction of the universe intelligible. In the same sense the
transcendental philosopher says; grant me a nature having two contrary
forces, the one of which tends to expand infinitely, while the other
strives to apprehend or find itself in this infinity, and I will
cause the world of intelllgences with the whole system of their
representations to rise up before you. Every other science presupposes
intelligence as already existing and complete: the philosopher
contemplates it in its growth, and as it were represents its history to
the mind from its birth to its maturity.

The venerable sage of Koenigsberg has preceded the march of this
master-thought as an effective pioneer in his essay on the introduction
of negative quantities into philosophy, published 1763. In this he
has shown, that instead of assailing the science of mathematics by
metaphysics, as Berkeley did in his ANALYST, or of sophisticating it,
as Wolf did, by the vain attempt of deducing the first principles
of geometry from supposed deeper grounds of ontology, it behoved the
metaphysician rather to examine whether the only province of knowledge,
which man has succeeded in erecting into a pure science, might not
furnish materials, or at least hints, for establishing and pacifying the
unsettled, warring, and embroiled domain of philosophy. An imitation of
the mathematical method had indeed been attempted with no better success
than attended the essay of David to wear the armour of Saul. Another
use however is possible and of far greater promise, namely, the actual
application of the positions which had so wonderfully enlarged the
discoveries of geometry, mutatis mutandis, to philosophical subjects.
Kant having briefly illustrated the utility of such an attempt in the
questions of space, motion, and infinitely small quantities, as employed
by the mathematician, proceeds to the idea of negative quantities and
the transfer of them to metaphysical investigation. Opposites, he
well observes, are of two kinds, either logical, that is, such as are
absolutely incompatible; or real, without being contradictory. The
former he denominates Nihil negativum irrepraesentabile, the connection
of which produces nonsense. A body in motion is something--Aliquid
cogitabile; but a body, at one and the same time in motion and not in
motion, is nothing, or, at most, air articulated into nonsense. But a
motory force of a body in one direction, and an equal force of the
same body in an opposite direction is not incompatible, and the
result, namely, rest, is real and representable. For the purposes of
mathematical calculus it is indifferent which force we term negative,
and which positive, and consequently we appropriate the latter to that,
which happens to be the principal object in our thoughts. Thus if a
man's capital be ten and his debts eight, the subtraction will be the
same, whether we call the capital negative debt, or the debt negative
capital. But in as much as the latter stands practically in reference to
the former, we of course represent the sum as 10-8. It is equally clear
that two equal forces acting in opposite directions, both being finite
and each distinguished from the other by its direction only, must
neutralize or reduce each other to inaction. Now the transcendental
philosophy demands; first, that two forces should be conceived which
counteract each other by their essential nature; not only not in
consequence of the accidental direction of each, but as prior to all
direction, nay, as the primary forces from which the conditions of all
possible directions are derivative and deducible: secondly, that
these forces should be assumed to be both alike infinite, both alike
indestructible. The problem will then be to discover the result or
product of two such forces, as distinguished from the result of those
forces which are finite, and derive their difference solely from the
circumstance of their direction.
When we have formed a scheme or outline
of these two different kinds of force, and of their different results,
by the process of discursive reasoning, it will then remain for us to
elevate the thesis from notional to actual, by contemplating intuitively
this one power with its two inherent indestructible yet counteracting
forces, and the results or generations to which their inter-penetration
gives existence, in the living principle and in the process of our own
self-consciousness. By what instrument this is possible the solution
itself will discover, at the same time that it will reveal to and for
whom it is possible. Non omnia possumus omnes. There is a philosophic
no less than a poetic genius, which is differenced from the highest
perfection of talent, not by degree but by kind.

The counteraction then of the two assumed forces does not depend on
their meeting from opposite directions; the power which acts in them
is indestructible; it is therefore inexhaustibly re-ebullient; and as
something must be the result of these two forces, both alike infinite,
and both alike indestructible; and as rest or neutralization cannot be
this result; no other conception is possible, but that the product must
be a tertium aliquid, or finite generation. Consequently this conception
is necessary. Now this tertium aliquid can be no other than an
inter-penetration of the counteracting powers, partaking of both.

* * * * * *

Thus far had the work been transcribed for the press, when I received
the following letter from a friend, whose practical judgment I have had
ample reason to estimate and revere, and whose taste and sensibility
preclude all the excuses which my self-love might possibly have prompted
me to set up in plea against the decision of advisers of equal good
sense, but with less tact and feeling.

"Dear C.

"You ask my opinion concerning your Chapter on the Imagination,
both as to the impressions it made on myself, and as to those which I
think it will make on the Public, i. e. that part of the public, who,
from the title of the work and from its forming a sort of introduction
to a volume of poems, are likely to constitute the great majority of
your readers.

"As to myself, and stating in the first place the effect on my
understanding, your opinions and method of argument were not only so new
to me, but so directly the reverse of all I had ever been accustomed
to consider as truth, that even if I had comprehended your premises
sufficiently to have admitted them, and had seen the necessity of your
conclusions, I should still have been in that state of mind, which in
your note in Chap. IV you have so ingeniously evolved, as the antithesis
to that in which a man is, when he makes a bull. In your own words, I
should have felt as if I had been standing on my head.

"The effect on my feelings, on the other hand, I cannot better
represent, than by supposing myself to have known only our light airy
modern chapels of ease, and then for the first time to have been placed,
and left alone, in one of our largest Gothic cathedrals in a gusty
moonlight night of autumn. 'Now in glimmer, and now in gloom;' often
in palpable darkness not without a chilly sensation of terror; then
suddenly emerging into broad yet visionary lights with coloured shadows
of fantastic shapes, yet all decked with holy insignia and mystic
symbols; and ever and anon coming out full upon pictures and stone-work
images of great men, with whose names I was familiar, but which looked
upon me with countenances and an expression, the most dissimilar to all
I had been in the habit of connecting with those names. Those whom I had
been taught to venerate as almost super-human in magnitude of intellect,
I found perched in little fret-work niches, as grotesque dwarfs; while
the grotesques, in my hitherto belief, stood guarding the high altar
with all the characters of apotheosis. In short, what I had supposed
substances were thinned away into shadows, while everywhere shadows were
deepened into substances:

If substance might be call'd that shadow seem'd,
For each seem'd either!

"Yet after all, I could not but repeat the lines which you had quoted
from a MS. poem of your own in the FRIEND, and applied to a work of Mr.
Wordsworth's though with a few of the words altered:

------An Orphic tale indeed,
A tale obscure of high and passionate thoughts
To a strange music chanted!

"Be assured, however, that I look forward anxiously to your great book
on the CONSTRUCTIVE PHILOSOPHY, which you have promised and announced:
and that I will do my best to understand it. Only I will not promise to
descend into the dark cave of Trophonius with you, there to rub my
own eyes, in order to make the sparks and figured flashes, which I am
required to see.

"So much for myself. But as for the Public I do not hesitate a moment in
advising and urging you to withdraw the Chapter from the present
work, and to reserve it for your announced treatises on the Logos or
communicative intellect in Man and Deity. First, because imperfectly as
I understand the present Chapter, I see clearly that you have done too
much, and yet not enough. You have been obliged to omit so many links,
from the necessity of compression, that what remains, looks (if I may
recur to my former illustration) like the fragments of the winding steps
of an old ruined tower. Secondly, a still stronger argument (at least
one that I am sure will be more forcible with you) is, that your readers
will have both right and reason to complain of you. This Chapter, which
cannot, when it is printed, amount to so little as an hundred pages,
will of necessity greatly increase the expense of the work; and every
reader who, like myself, is neither prepared nor perhaps calculated for
the study of so abstruse a subject so abstrusely treated, will, as
I have before hinted, be almost entitled to accuse you of a sort of
imposition on him. For who, he might truly observe, could from your
title-page, to wit, "My Literary Life and Opinions," published too as
introductory to a volume of miscellaneous poems, have anticipated, or
even conjectured, a long treatise on Ideal Realism which holds the same
relation in abstruseness to Plotinus, as Plotinus does to Plato. It will
be well, if already you have not too much of metaphysical disquisition
in your work, though as the larger part of the disquisition is
historical, it will doubtless be both interesting and instructive to
many to whose unprepared minds your speculations on the esemplastic
power would be utterly unintelligible. Be assured, if you do publish
this Chapter in the present work, you will be reminded of Bishop
Berkeley's Siris, announced as an Essay on Tar-water, which beginning
with Tar ends with the Trinity, the omne scibile forming the interspace.
I say in the present work. In that greater work to which you have
devoted so many years, and study so intense and various, it will be in
its proper place. Your prospectus will have described and announced both
its contents and their nature; and if any persons purchase it, who
feel no interest in the subjects of which it treats, they will have
themselves only to blame.

"I could add to these arguments one derived from pecuniary motives,
and particularly from the probable effects on the sale of your present
publication; but they would weigh little with you compared with the
preceding. Besides, I have long observed, that arguments drawn from
your own personal interests more often act on you as narcotics than as
stimulants, and that in money concerns you have some small portion
of pig-nature in your moral idiosyncrasy, and, like these amiable
creatures, must occasionally be pulled backward from the boat in order
to make you enter it. All success attend you, for if hard thinking and
hard reading are merits, you have deserved it.

"Your affectionate, etc. "


In consequence of this very judicious letter, which produced complete
conviction on my mind, I shall content myself for the present with
stating the main result of the chapter, which I have reserved for that
future publication, a detailed prospectus of which the reader will find
at the close of the second volume.

The Imagination then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The
primary Imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all
human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal
act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary Imagination I
consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will,
yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency,
and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It
dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate: or where this
process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to
idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as
objects) are essentially fixed and dead.

FANCY, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities
and definites. The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory
emancipated from the order of time and space; while it is blended with,
and modified by that empirical phaenomenon of the will, which we express
by the word Choice. But equally with the ordinary memory the Fancy must
receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.




CHAPTER XIV

Occasion of the Lyrical Ballads, and the objects originally
proposed--Preface to the second edition--The ensuing controversy, its
causes and acrimony--Philosophic definitions of a Poem and Poetry with
scholia.


During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours, our
conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry,
the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence
to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty
by the modifying colours of imagination. The sudden charm, which
accidents of light and shade, which moon-light or sunset diffused over
a known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability
of combining both. These are the poetry of nature. The thought suggested
itself--(to which of us I do not recollect)--that a series of poems
might be composed of two sorts. In the one, the incidents and agents
were to be, in part at least, supernatural; and the excellence aimed
at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic
truth of such emotions, as would naturally accompany such situations,
supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every
human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time
believed himself under supernatural agency. For the second class,
subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life; the characters and
incidents were to be such as will be found in every village and its
vicinity, where there is a meditative and feeling mind to seek after
them, or to notice them, when they present themselves.

In this idea originated the plan of the LYRICAL BALLADS; in which it was
agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters
supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our
inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to
procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension
of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. Mr.
Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself as his object,
to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a
feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention
to the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the
wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for
which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude,
we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither
feel nor understand.

With this view I wrote THE ANCIENT MARINER, and was preparing among
other poems, THE DARK LADIE, and the CHRISTABEL, in which I should have
more nearly realized my ideal, than I had done in my first attempt. But
Mr. Wordsworth's industry had proved so much more successful, and the
number of his poems so much greater, that my compositions, instead of
forming a balance, appeared rather an interpolation of heterogeneous
matter. Mr. Wordsworth added two or three poems written in his own
character, in the impassioned, lofty, and sustained diction, which is
characteristic of his genius. In this form the LYRICAL BALLADS were
published; and were presented by him, as an experiment, whether
subjects, which from their nature rejected the usual ornaments and
extra-colloquial style of poems in general, might not be so managed in
the language of ordinary life as to produce the pleasurable interest,
which it is the peculiar business of poetry to impart. To the
second edition he added a preface of considerable length; in which,
notwithstanding some passages of apparently a contrary import, he was
understood to contend for the extension of this style to poetry of all
kinds, and to reject as vicious and indefensible all phrases and forms
of speech that were not included in what he (unfortunately, I think,
adopting an equivocal expression) called the language of real life. From
this preface, prefixed to poems in which it was impossible to deny the
presence of original genius, however mistaken its direction might
be deemed, arose the whole long-continued controversy. For from the
conjunction of perceived power with supposed heresy I explain the
inveteracy and in some instances, I grieve to say, the acrimonious
passions, with which the controversy has been conducted by the
assailants.

Had Mr. Wordsworth's poems been the silly, the childish things, which
they were for a long time described as being had they been really
distinguished from the compositions of other poets merely by meanness of
language and inanity of thought; had they indeed contained nothing more
than what is found in the parodies and pretended imitations of them;
they must have sunk at once, a dead weight, into the slough of oblivion,
and have dragged the preface along with them. But year after year
increased the number of Mr. Wordsworth's admirers. They were found too
not in the lower classes of the reading public, but chiefly among young
men of strong sensibility and meditative minds; and their admiration
(inflamed perhaps in some degree by opposition) was distinguished by its
intensity, I might almost say, by its religious fervour. These facts,
and the intellectual energy of the author, which was more or less
consciously felt, where it was outwardly and even boisterously denied,
meeting with sentiments of aversion to his opinions, and of alarm at
their consequences, produced an eddy of criticism, which would of itself
have borne up the poems by the violence with which it whirled them round
and round. With many parts of this preface in the sense attributed
to them and which the words undoubtedly seem to authorize, I never
concurred; but on the contrary objected to them as erroneous in
principle, and as contradictory (in appearance at least) both to other
parts of the same preface, and to the author's own practice in the
greater part of the poems themselves. Mr. Wordsworth in his recent
collection has, I find, degraded this prefatory disquisition to the end
of his second volume, to be read or not at the reader's choice. But he
has not, as far as I can discover, announced any change in his poetic
creed. At all events, considering it as the source of a controversy,
in which I have been honoured more than I deserve by the frequent
conjunction of my name with his, I think it expedient to declare once
for all, in what points I coincide with the opinions supported in that
preface, and in what points I altogether differ. But in order to render
myself intelligible I must previously, in as few words as possible,
explain my views, first, of a Poem; and secondly, of Poetry itself, in
kind, and in essence.

The office of philosophical disquisition consists in just distinction;
while it is the privilege of the philosopher to preserve himself
constantly aware, that distinction is not division. In order to obtain
adequate notions of any truth, we must intellectually separate its
distinguishable parts; and this is the technical process of philosophy.
But having so done, we must then restore them in our conceptions to
the unity, in which they actually co-exist; and this is the result of
philosophy. A poem contains the same elements as a prose composition;
the difference therefore must consist in a different combination of
them, in consequence of a different object being proposed. According to
the difference of the object will be the difference of the combination.
It is possible, that the object may be merely to facilitate the
recollection of any given facts or observations by artificial
arrangement; and the composition will be a poem, merely because it is
distinguished from prose by metre, or by rhyme, or by both conjointly.
In this, the lowest sense, a man might attribute the name of a poem to
the well-known enumeration of the days in the several months;

"Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November," etc.

and others of the same class and purpose. And as a particular pleasure
is found in anticipating the recurrence of sounds and quantities,
all compositions that have this charm super-added, whatever be their
contents, may be entitled poems.

So much for the superficial form. A difference of object and contents
supplies an additional ground of distinction. The immediate purpose
may be the communication of truths; either of truth absolute and
demonstrable, as in works of science; or of facts experienced and
recorded, as in history. Pleasure, and that of the highest and most
permanent kind, may result from the attainment of the end; but it is not
itself the immediate end. In other works the communication of pleasure
may be the immediate purpose; and though truth, either moral or
intellectual, ought to be the ultimate end, yet this will distinguish
the character of the author, not the class to which the work belongs.
Blest indeed is that state of society, in which the immediate purpose
would be baffled by the perversion of the proper ultimate end; in which
no charm of diction or imagery could exempt the BATHYLLUS even of an
Anacreon, or the ALEXIS of Virgil, from disgust and aversion!

But the communication of pleasure may be the immediate object of a work
not metrically composed; and that object may have been in a high degree
attained, as in novels and romances. Would then the mere superaddition
of metre, with or without rhyme, entitle these to the name of poems? The
answer is, that nothing can permanently please, which does not contain
in itself the reason why it is so, and not otherwise. If metre be
superadded, all other parts must be made consonant with it. They must be
such, as to justify the perpetual and distinct attention to each
part, which an exact correspondent recurrence of accent and sound are
calculated to excite. The final definition then, so deduced, may be thus
worded. A poem is that species of composition, which is opposed to works
of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth;
and from all other species--(having this object in common with it)--it
is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole, as
is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part.

Controversy is not seldom excited in consequence of the disputants
attaching each a different meaning to the same word; and in few
instances has this been more striking, than in disputes concerning the
present subject. If a man chooses to call every composition a
poem, which is rhyme, or measure, or both, I must leave his opinion
uncontroverted. The distinction is at least competent to characterize
the writer's intention. If it were subjoined, that the whole is likewise
entertaining or affecting, as a tale, or as a series of interesting
reflections; I of course admit this as another fit ingredient of a poem,
and an additional merit. But if the definition sought for be that of a
legitimate poem, I answer, it must be one, the parts of which mutually
support and explain each other; all in their proportion harmonizing
with, and supporting the purpose and known influences of metrical
arrangement. The philosophic critics of all ages coincide with the
ultimate judgment of all countries, in equally denying the praises of a
just poem, on the one hand, to a series of striking lines or distiches,
each of which, absorbing the whole attention of the reader to itself,
becomes disjoined from its context, and forms a separate whole,
instead of a harmonizing part; and on the other hand, to an unsustained
composition, from which the reader collects rapidly the general result
unattracted by the component parts. The reader should be carried
forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity,
or by a restless desire to arrive at the final solution; but by the
pleasureable activity of mind excited by the attractions of the journey
itself. Like the motion of a serpent, which the Egyptians made the
emblem of intellectual power; or like the path of sound through
the air;--at every step he pauses and half recedes; and from the
retrogressive movement collects the force which again carries him
onward. Praecipitandus est liber spiritus, says Petronius most happily.
The epithet, liber, here balances the preceding verb; and it is not easy
to conceive more meaning condensed in fewer words.

But if this should be admitted as a satisfactory character of a poem,
we have still to seek for a definition of poetry. The writings of Plato,
and Jeremy Taylor, and Burnet's Theory of the Earth, furnish undeniable
proofs that poetry of the highest kind may exist without metre, and even
without the contradistringuishing objects of a poem. The first chapter
of Isaiah--(indeed a very large portion of the whole book)--is poetry
in the most emphatic sense; yet it would be not less irrational than
strange to assert, that pleasure, and not truth was the immediate object
of the prophet. In short, whatever specific import we attach to the
word, Poetry, there will be found involved in it, as a necessary
consequence, that a poem of any length neither can be, nor ought to be,
all poetry. Yet if an harmonious whole is to be produced, the remaining
parts must be preserved in keeping with the poetry; and this can be
no otherwise effected than by such a studied selection and artificial
arrangement, as will partake of one, though not a peculiar property of
poetry. And this again can be no other than the property of exciting a
more continuous and equal attention than the language of prose aims at,
whether colloquial or written.

My own conclusions on the nature of poetry, in the strictest use of the
word, have been in part anticipated in some of the remarks on the Fancy
and Imagination in the early part of this work. What is poetry? --is so
nearly the same question with, what is a poet? --that the answer to the
one is involved in the solution of the other. For it is a distinction
resulting from the poetic genius itself, which sustains and modifies the
images, thoughts, and emotions of the poet's own mind.

The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man
into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other
according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and
spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each,
by that synthetic and magical power, to which I would exclusively
appropriate the name of Imagination. This power, first put in action by
the will and understanding, and retained under their irremissive, though
gentle and unnoticed, control, laxis effertur habenis, reveals "itself
in the balance or reconcilement of opposite or discordant" qualities:
of sameness, with difference; of the general with the concrete; the idea
with the image; the individual with the representative; the sense of
novelty and freshness with old and familiar objects; a more than usual
state of emotion with more than usual order; judgment ever awake and
steady self-possession with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement;
and while it blends and harmonizes the natural and the artificial, still
subordinates art to nature; the manner to the matter; and our admiration
of the poet to our sympathy with the poetry. Doubtless, as Sir John
Davies observes of the soul--(and his words may with slight alteration
be applied, and even more appropriately, to the poetic Imagination)--

Doubtless this could not be, but that she turns
Bodies to spirit by sublimation strange,
As fire converts to fire the things it burns,
As we our food into our nature change.

From their gross matter she abstracts their forms,
And draws a kind of quintessence from things;
Which to her proper nature she transforms
To bear them light on her celestial wings.

Thus does she, when from individual states
She doth abstract the universal kinds;
Which then re-clothed in divers names and fates
Steal access through the senses to our minds.

Finally, Good Sense is the Body of poetic genius, Fancy its Drapery,
Motion its Life, and Imagination the Soul that is everywhere, and in
each; and forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole.




CHAPTER XV

The specific symptoms of poetic power elucidated in a critical analysis
of Shakespeare's VENUS AND ADONIS, and RAPE of LUCRECE.


In the application of these principles to purposes of practical
criticism, as employed in the appraisement of works more or less
imperfect, I have endeavoured to discover what the qualities in a poem
are, which may be deemed promises and specific symptoms of poetic power,
as distinguished from general talent determined to poetic composition
by accidental motives, by an act of the will, rather than by the
inspiration of a genial and productive nature. In this investigation, I
could not, I thought, do better, than keep before me the earliest work
of the greatest genius, that perhaps human nature has yet produced, our
myriad-minded [61] Shakespeare. I mean the VENUS AND ADONIS, and the
LUCRECE; works which give at once strong promises of the strength,
and yet obvious proofs of the immaturity, of his genius. From these I
abstracted the following marks, as characteristics of original poetic
genius in general.

1. In the VENUS AND ADONIS, the first and most obvious excellence is the
perfect sweetness of the versification; its adaptation to the subject;
and the power displayed in varying the march of the words without
passing into a loftier and more majestic rhythm than was demanded by the
thoughts, or permitted by the propriety of preserving a sense of melody
predominant. The delight in richness and sweetness of sound, even to
a faulty excess, if it be evidently original, and not the result of an
easily imitable mechanism, I regard as a highly favourable promise in
the compositions of a young man. The man that hath not music in his soul
can indeed never be a genuine poet. Imagery,--(even taken from nature,
much more when transplanted from books, as travels, voyages, and works
of natural history),--affecting incidents, just thoughts, interesting
personal or domestic feelings, and with these the art of their
combination or intertexture in the form of a poem,--may all by incessant
effort be acquired as a trade, by a man of talent and much reading,
who, as I once before observed, has mistaken an intense desire of poetic
reputation for a natural poetic genius; the love of the arbitrary
end for a possession of the peculiar means. But the sense of musical
delight, with the power of producing it, is a gift of imagination; and
this together with the power of reducing multitude into unity of effect,
and modifying a series of thoughts by some one predominant thought or
feeling, may be cultivated and improved, but can never be learned. It is
in these that "poeta nascitur non fit. "

2. A second promise of genius is the choice of subjects very remote from
the private interests and circumstances of the writer himself. At least
I have found, that where the subject is taken immediately from the
author's personal sensations and experiences, the excellence of a
particular poem is but an equivocal mark, and often a fallacious
pledge, of genuine poetic power. We may perhaps remember the tale of the
statuary, who had acquired considerable reputation for the legs of his
goddesses, though the rest of the statue accorded but indifferently with
ideal beauty; till his wife, elated by her husband's praises, modestly
acknowledged that she had been his constant model. In the VENUS
AND ADONIS this proof of poetic power exists even to excess. It is
throughout as if a superior spirit more intuitive, more intimately
conscious, even than the characters themselves, not only of every
outward look and act, but of the flux and reflux of the mind in all its
subtlest thoughts and feelings, were placing the whole before our view;
himself meanwhile unparticipating in the passions, and actuated only
by that pleasurable excitement, which had resulted from the energetic
fervour of his own spirit in so vividly exhibiting what it had
so accurately and profoundly contemplated. I think, I should have
conjectured from these poems, that even then the great instinct, which
impelled the poet to the drama, was secretly working in him, prompting
him--by a series and never broken chain of imagery, always vivid and,
because unbroken, often minute; by the highest effort of the picturesque
in words, of which words are capable, higher perhaps than was ever
realized by any other poet, even Dante not excepted; to provide a
substitute for that visual language, that constant intervention and
running comment by tone, look and gesture, which in his dramatic works
he was entitled to expect from the players. His Venus and Adonis seem
at once the characters themselves, and the whole representation of those
characters by the most consummate actors. You seem to be told nothing,
but to see and hear everything. Hence it is, from the perpetual activity
of attention required on the part of the reader; from the rapid flow,
the quick change, and the playful nature of the thoughts and images; and
above all from the alienation, and, if I may hazard such an expression,
the utter aloofness of the poet's own feelings, from those of which he
is at once the painter and the analyst; that though the very subject
cannot but detract from the pleasure of a delicate mind, yet never was
poem less dangerous on a moral account. Instead of doing as Ariosto, and
as, still more offensively, Wieland has done, instead of degrading and
deforming passion into appetite, the trials of love into the struggles
of concupiscence; Shakespeare has here represented the animal impulse
itself, so as to preclude all sympathy with it, by dissipating the
reader's notice among the thousand outward images, and now beautiful,
now fanciful circumstances, which form its dresses and its scenery; or
by diverting our attention from the main subject by those frequent witty
or profound reflections, which the poet's ever active mind has deduced
from, or connected with, the imagery and the incidents. The reader is
forced into too much action to sympathize with the merely passive of our
nature. As little can a mind thus roused and awakened be brooded on by
mean and indistinct emotion, as the low, lazy mist can creep upon the
surface of a lake, while a strong gale is driving it onward in waves and
billows.

3. It has been before observed that images, however beautiful, though
faithfully copied from nature, and as accurately represented in words,
do not of themselves characterize the poet. They become proofs of
original genius only as far as they are modified by a predominant
passion; or by associated thoughts or images awakened by that passion;
or when they have the effect of reducing multitude to unity, or
succession to an instant; or lastly, when a human and intellectual life
is transferred to them from the poet's own spirit,

Which shoots its being through earth, sea, and air.

In the two following lines for instance, there is nothing objectionable,
nothing which would preclude them from forming, in their proper place,
part of a descriptive poem:

Behold yon row of pines, that shorn and bow'd
Bend from the sea-blast, seen at twilight eve.

But with a small alteration of rhythm, the same words would be equally
in their place in a book of topography, or in a descriptive tour. The
same image will rise into semblance of poetry if thus conveyed:

Yon row of bleak and visionary pines,
By twilight glimpse discerned, mark! how they flee
From the fierce sea-blast, all their tresses wild
Streaming before them.

I have given this as an illustration, by no means as an instance, of
that particular excellence which I had in view, and in which Shakespeare
even in his earliest, as in his latest, works surpasses all other
poets. It is by this, that he still gives a dignity and a passion to
the objects which he presents. Unaided by any previous excitement, they
burst upon us at once in life and in power,--

"Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye. "

"Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come--

* * * * * *
* * * * * *

The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured,
And the sad augurs mock their own presage;
Incertainties now crown themselves assur'd,
And Peace proclaims olives of endless age.
Now with the drops of this most balmy time
My love looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes,
Since spite of him, I'll live in this poor rhyme,
While he insults o'er dull and speechless tribes.
And thou in this shalt find thy monument,
When tyrants' crests, and tombs of brass are spent. "

As of higher worth, so doubtless still more characteristic of poetic
genius does the imagery become, when it moulds and colours itself to the
circumstances, passion, or character, present and foremost in the mind.
For unrivalled instances of this excellence, the reader's own memory
will refer him to the LEAR, OTHELLO, in short to which not of the
"great, ever living, dead man's" dramatic works? Inopem em copia
fecit. How true it is to nature, he has himself finely expressed in the
instance of love in his 98th Sonnet.

From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud-pied April drest in all its trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing;
That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leap'd with him.
Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell
Of different flowers in odour and in hue,
Could make me any summer's story tell,
Or from their proud lap pluck them, where they grew
Nor did I wonder at the lilies white,
Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose;
They were, tho' sweet, but figures of delight,
Drawn after you, you pattern of all those.
Yet seem'd it winter still, and, you away,
As with your shadow, I with these did play! "

Scarcely less sure, or if a less valuable, not less indispensable mark

Gonimon men poiaetou------
------hostis rhaema gennaion lakoi,

will the imagery supply, when, with more than the power of the painter,
the poet gives us the liveliest image of succession with the feeling of
simultaneousness:--

With this, he breaketh from the sweet embrace
Of those fair arms, which bound him to her breast,
And homeward through the dark laund runs apace;--

* * * * * *

Look! how a bright star shooteth from the sky,
So glides he in the night from Venus' eye.

4. The last character I shall mention, which would prove indeed but
little, except as taken conjointly with the former;--yet without which
the former could scarce exist in a high degree, and (even if this were
possible) would give promises only of transitory flashes and a meteoric
power;--is depth, and energy of thought. No man was ever yet a great
poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher. For poetry
is the blossom and the fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts,
human passions, emotions, language. In Shakespeare's poems the creative
power and the intellectual energy wrestle as in a war embrace. Each in
its excess of strength seems to threaten the extinction of the other.
At length in the drama they were reconciled, and fought each with its
shield before the breast of the other. Or like two rapid streams, that,
at their first meeting within narrow and rocky banks, mutually strive
to repel each other and intermix reluctantly and in tumult; but soon
finding a wider channel and more yielding shores blend, and dilate, and
flow on in one current and with one voice. The VENUS AND ADONIS did
not perhaps allow the display of the deeper passions. But the story of
Lucretia seems to favour and even demand their intensest workings. And
yet we find in Shakespeare's management of the tale neither pathos,
nor any other dramatic quality. There is the same minute and faithful
imagery as in the former poem, in the same vivid colours, inspirited by
the same impetuous vigour of thought, and diverging and contracting with
the same activity of the assimilative and of the modifying faculties;
and with a yet larger display, a yet wider range of knowledge
and reflection; and lastly, with the same perfect dominion, often
domination, over the whole world of language. What then shall we say?
even this; that Shakespeare, no mere child of nature; no automaton of
genius; no passive vehicle of inspiration, possessed by the spirit, not
possessing it; first studied patiently, meditated deeply, understood
minutely, till knowledge, become habitual and intuitive, wedded itself
to his habitual feelings, and at length gave birth to that stupendous
power, by which he stands alone, with no equal or second in his own
class; to that power which seated him on one of the two glory-smitten
summits of the poetic mountain, with Milton as his compeer not rival.
While the former darts himself forth, and passes into all the forms of
human character and passion, the one Proteus of the fire and the flood;
the other attracts all forms and things to himself, into the unity of
his own ideal. All things and modes of action shape themselves anew in
the being of Milton; while Shakespeare becomes all things, yet for ever
remaining himself. O what great men hast thou not produced, England, my
country! --Truly indeed--

We must be free or die, who speak the tongue,
Which Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold,
Which Milton held. In everything we are sprung
Of earth's first blood, have titles manifold.




CHAPTER XVI

Striking points of difference between the Poets of the present age and
those of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries--Wish expressed for the
union of the characteristic merits of both.


Christendom, from its first settlement on feudal rights, has been so
far one great body, however imperfectly organized, that a similar spirit
will be found in each period to have been acting in all its members.
The study of Shakespeare's poems--(I do not include his dramatic works,
eminently as they too deserve that title)--led me to a more careful
examination of the contemporary poets both in England and in other
countries.