It would perhaps
have been destructive, had it been continued; but from this I was
auspiciously withdrawn, partly indeed by an accidental introduction to
an amiable family, chiefly however, by the genial influence of a style
of poetry, so tender and yet so manly, so natural and real, and yet so
dignified and harmonious, as the sonnets and other early poems of Mr.
have been destructive, had it been continued; but from this I was
auspiciously withdrawn, partly indeed by an accidental introduction to
an amiable family, chiefly however, by the genial influence of a style
of poetry, so tender and yet so manly, so natural and real, and yet so
dignified and harmonious, as the sonnets and other early poems of Mr.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
?
Project Gutenberg's Biographia Literaria, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Title: Biographia Literaria
Author: Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA
By Samuel Taylor Coleridge
LIST OF CONTENTS
CHAP.
I Motives to the present work--Reception of the Author's first
publication--Discipline of his taste at school--Effect of
contemporary writers on youthful minds--Bowles's Sonnets--
Comparison between the poets before and since
II Supposed irritability of genius brought to the test of
facts--Causes and occasions of the charge--Its injustice
III The Author's obligations to Critics, and the probable
occasion--Principles of modern criticism--Mr. Southey's
works and character
IV The Lyrical Ballads with the Preface--Mr. Wordsworth's
earlier poems--On Fancy and Imagination--The investigation
of the distinction important to the Fine Arts
V On the law of Association--Its history traced from Aristotle
to Hartley
VI That Hartley's system, as far as it differs from that of
Aristotle, is neither tenable in theory, nor founded
in facts
VII Of the necessary consequences of the Hartleian Theory--Of
the original mistake or equivocation which procured its
admission--Memoria technica
VIII The system of Dualism introduced by Des Cartes--Refined
first by Spinoza and afterwards by Leibnitz into the
doctrine of Harmonia praestabilita--Hylozoism--Materialism
--None of these systems, or any possible theory of
Association, supplies or supersedes a theory of
Perception, or explains the formation of the Associable
XI Is Philosophy possible as a science, and what are its
conditions? --Giordano Bruno--Literary Aristocracy, or the
existence of a tacit compact among the learned as a
privileged order--The Author's obligations to the Mystics-
To Immanuel Kant--The difference between the letter and
The spirit of Kant's writings, and a vindication of
Prudence in the teaching of Philosophy--Fichte's attempt
to complete the Critical system-Its partial success and
ultimate failure--Obligations to Schelling; and among
English writers to Saumarez
X A Chapter of digression and anecdotes, as an interlude
preceding that on the nature and genesis of the Imagination
or Plastic Power--On Pedantry and pedantic expressions--
Advice to young authors respecting publication--Various
anecdotes of the Author's literary life, and the progress
of his opinions in Religion and Politics
XI An affectionate exhortation to those who in early life feel
themselves disposed to become authors
XII A Chapter of requests and premonitions concerning the perusal
or omission of the chapter that follows
XIII On the Imagination, or Esemplastic power
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
XV The specific symptoms of poetic power elucidated in a
Critical analysis of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, and
Rape of Lucrece
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
XVII Examination of the tenets peculiar to Mr. Wordsworth--
Rustic life (above all, low and rustic life) especially
unfavourable to the formation of a human diction-The
best parts of language the product of philosophers, not of
clowns or shepherds--Poetry essentially ideal and generic--
The language of Milton as much the language of real life,
yea, incomparably more so than that of the cottager
XVIII Language of metrical composition, why and wherein essentially
different from that of prose--Origin and elements of metre
--Its necessary consequences, and the conditions thereby
imposed on the metrical writer in the choice of his diction
XIX Continuation--Concerning the real object, which, it is
probable, Mr. Wordsworth had before him in his critical
preface--Elucidation and application of this
XX The former subject continued--The neutral style, or that
common to Prose and Poetry, exemplified by specimens from
Chaucer, Herbert, and others
XXI Remarks on the present mode of conducting critical journals
XXII The characteristic defects of Wordsworth's poetry, with the
principles from which the judgment, that they are defects,
is deduced--Their proportion to the beauties--For the
greatest part characteristic of his theory only
SATYRANE'S LETTERS
XXIII Critique on Bertram
XXIV Conclusion
So wenig er auch bestimmt seyn mag, andere zu belehren, so wuenscht
er doch sich denen mitzutheilen, die er sich gleichgesinnt weis, (oder
hofft,) deren Anzahl aber in der Breite der Welt zerstreut ist; er
wuenscht sein Verhaeltniss zu den aeltesten Freunden dadurch wieder
anzuknuepfen, mit neuen es fortzusetzen, und in der letzten Generation
sich wieder andere fur seine uebrige Lebenszeit zu gewinnen. Er wuenscht
der Jugend die Umwege zu ersparen, auf denen er sich selbst verirrte.
(Goethe. Einleitung in die Propylaeen. )
TRANSLATION. Little call as he may have to instruct others, he wishes
nevertheless to open out his heart to such as he either knows or hopes
to be of like mind with himself, but who are widely scattered in the
world: he wishes to knit anew his connections with his oldest friends,
to continue those recently formed, and to win other friends among the
rising generation for the remaining course of his life. He wishes to
spare the young those circuitous paths, on which he himself had lost his
way.
BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA
CHAPTER I
Motives to the present work--Reception of the Author's first
publication--Discipline of his taste at school--Effect of contemporary
writers on youthful minds--Bowles's Sonnets--Comparison between the
poets before and since Pope.
It has been my lot to have had my name introduced both in conversation,
and in print, more frequently than I find it easy to explain, whether
I consider the fewness, unimportance, and limited circulation of my
writings, or the retirement and distance, in which I have lived, both
from the literary and political world. Most often it has been connected
with some charge which I could not acknowledge, or some principle which
I had never entertained. Nevertheless, had I had no other motive
or incitement, the reader would not have been troubled with this
exculpation. What my additional purposes were, will be seen in the
following pages. It will be found, that the least of what I have written
concerns myself personally. I have used the narration chiefly for the
purpose of giving a continuity to the work, in part for the sake of
the miscellaneous reflections suggested to me by particular events, but
still more as introductory to a statement of my principles in Politics,
Religion, and Philosophy, and an application of the rules, deduced from
philosophical principles, to poetry and criticism. But of the objects,
which I proposed to myself, it was not the least important to effect,
as far as possible, a settlement of the long continued controversy
concerning the true nature of poetic diction; and at the same time to
define with the utmost impartiality the real poetic character of the
poet, by whose writings this controversy was first kindled, and has been
since fuelled and fanned.
In the spring of 1796, when I had but little passed the verge of
manhood, I published a small volume of juvenile poems. They were
received with a degree of favour, which, young as I was, I well know
was bestowed on them not so much for any positive merit, as because they
were considered buds of hope, and promises of better works to come. The
critics of that day, the most flattering, equally with the severest,
concurred in objecting to them obscurity, a general turgidness of
diction, and a profusion of new coined double epithets [1]. The first
is the fault which a writer is the least able to detect in his own
compositions: and my mind was not then sufficiently disciplined to
receive the authority of others, as a substitute for my own conviction.
Satisfied that the thoughts, such as they were, could not have been
expressed otherwise, or at least more perspicuously, I forgot to
inquire, whether the thoughts themselves did not demand a degree of
attention unsuitable to the nature and objects of poetry. This remark
however applies chiefly, though not exclusively, to the Religious
Musings. The remainder of the charge I admitted to its full extent,
and not without sincere acknowledgments both to my private and public
censors for their friendly admonitions. In the after editions, I pruned
the double epithets with no sparing hand, and used my best efforts to
tame the swell and glitter both of thought and diction; though in truth,
these parasite plants of youthful poetry had insinuated themselves into
my longer poems with such intricacy of union, that I was often obliged
to omit disentangling the weed, from the fear of snapping the flower.
From that period to the date of the present work I have published
nothing, with my name, which could by any possibility have come before
the board of anonymous criticism. Even the three or four poems, printed
with the works of a friend [2], as far as they were censured at all,
were charged with the same or similar defects, (though I am persuaded
not with equal justice),--with an excess of ornament, in addition to
strained and elaborate diction. I must be permitted to add, that,
even at the early period of my juvenile poems, I saw and admitted the
superiority of an austerer and more natural style, with an insight not
less clear, than I at present possess. My judgment was stronger than
were my powers of realizing its dictates; and the faults of my language,
though indeed partly owing to a wrong choice of subjects, and the desire
of giving a poetic colouring to abstract and metaphysical truths,
in which a new world then seemed to open upon me, did yet, in part
likewise, originate in unfeigned diffidence of my own comparative
talent. --During several years of my youth and early manhood, I
reverenced those who had re-introduced the manly simplicity of the
Greek, and of our own elder poets, with such enthusiasm as made the hope
seem presumptuous of writing successfully in the same style. Perhaps
a similar process has happened to others; but my earliest poems were
marked by an ease and simplicity, which I have studied, perhaps with
inferior success, to impress on my later compositions.
At school, (Christ's Hospital,) I enjoyed the inestimable advantage of
a very sensible, though at the same time, a very severe master, the
Reverend James Bowyer. He early moulded my taste to the preference of
Demosthenes to Cicero, of Homer and Theocritus to Virgil, and again of
Virgil to Ovid. He habituated me to compare Lucretius, (in such extracts
as I then read,) Terence, and above all the chaster poems of Catullus,
not only with the Roman poets of the, so called, silver and brazen ages;
but with even those of the Augustan aera: and on grounds of plain sense
and universal logic to see and assert the superiority of the former in
the truth and nativeness both of their thoughts and diction. At the
same time that we were studying the Greek tragic poets, he made us read
Shakespeare and Milton as lessons: and they were the lessons too, which
required most time and trouble to bring up, so as to escape his
censure. I learned from him, that poetry, even that of the loftiest and,
seemingly, that of the wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as severe
as that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more
complex, and dependent on more, and more fugitive causes. In the truly
great poets, he would say, there is a reason assignable, not only for
every word, but for the position of every word; and I well remember
that, availing himself of the synonymes to the Homer of Didymus, he made
us attempt to show, with regard to each, why it would not have answered
the same purpose; and wherein consisted the peculiar fitness of the word
in the original text.
In our own English compositions, (at least for the last three years of
our school education,) he showed no mercy to phrase, metaphor, or image,
unsupported by a sound sense, or where the same sense might have been
conveyed with equal force and dignity in plainer words [3]. Lute,
harp, and lyre, Muse, Muses, and inspirations, Pegasus, Parnassus, and
Hippocrene were all an abomination to him. In fancy I can almost hear
him now, exclaiming "Harp? Harp? Lyre? Pen and ink, boy, you mean! Muse,
boy, Muse? Your nurse's daughter, you mean! Pierian spring? Oh aye!
the cloister-pump, I suppose! " Nay certain introductions, similes,
and examples, were placed by name on a list of interdiction. Among the
similes, there was, I remember, that of the manchineel fruit, as suiting
equally well with too many subjects; in which however it yielded the
palm at once to the example of Alexander and Clytus, which
was equally good and apt, whatever might be the theme. Was
it ambition? Alexander and Clytus! --Flattery? Alexander and
Clytus! --anger--drunkenness--pride--friendship--ingratitude--late
repentance? Still, still Alexander and Clytus! At length, the praises of
agriculture having been exemplified in the sagacious observation that,
had Alexander been holding the plough, he would not have run his friend
Clytus through with a spear, this tried, and serviceable old friend
was banished by public edict in saecula saeculorum. I have sometimes
ventured to think, that a list of this kind, or an index expurgatorius
of certain well-known and ever-returning phrases, both introductory,
and transitional, including a large assortment of modest egoisms, and
flattering illeisms, and the like, might be hung up in our Law-courts,
and both Houses of Parliament, with great advantage to the public, as
an important saving of national time, an incalculable relief to his
Majesty's ministers, but above all, as insuring the thanks of country
attornies, and their clients, who have private bills to carry through
the House.
Be this as it may, there was one custom of our master's, which I
cannot pass over in silence, because I think it imitable and worthy of
imitation. He would often permit our exercises, under some pretext of
want of time, to accumulate, till each lad had four or five to be looked
over. Then placing the whole number abreast on his desk, he would
ask the writer, why this or that sentence might not have found
as appropriate a place under this or that other thesis: and if no
satisfying answer could be returned, and two faults of the same kind
were found in one exercise, the irrevocable verdict followed, the
exercise was torn up, and another on the same subject to be produced, in
addition to the tasks of the day. The reader will, I trust, excuse this
tribute of recollection to a man, whose severities, even now, not seldom
furnish the dreams, by which the blind fancy would fain interpret to the
mind the painful sensations of distempered sleep; but neither lessen nor
dim the deep sense of my moral and intellectual obligations. He sent
us to the University excellent Latin and Greek scholars, and tolerable
Hebraists. Yet our classical knowledge was the least of the good gifts,
which we derived from his zealous and conscientious tutorage. He is now
gone to his final reward, full of years, and full of honours, even of
those honours, which were dearest to his heart, as gratefully bestowed
by that school, and still binding him to the interests of that school,
in which he had been himself educated, and to which during his whole
life he was a dedicated thing.
From causes, which this is not the place to investigate, no models
of past times, however perfect, can have the same vivid effect on
the youthful mind, as the productions of contemporary genius. The
discipline, my mind had undergone, Ne falleretur rotundo sono et versuum
cursu, cincinnis, et floribus; sed ut inspiceret quidnam subesset, quae,
sedes, quod firmamentum, quis fundus verbis; an figures essent mera
ornatura et orationis fucus; vel sanguinis e materiae ipsius corde
effluentis rubor quidam nativus et incalescentia genuina;--removed all
obstacles to the appreciation of excellence in style without diminishing
my delight. That I was thus prepared for the perusal of Mr. Bowles's
sonnets and earlier poems, at once increased their influence, and my
enthusiasm. The great works of past ages seem to a young man things of
another race, in respect to which his faculties must remain passive
and submiss, even as to the stars and mountains. But the writings of a
contemporary, perhaps not many years older than himself, surrounded by
the same circumstances, and disciplined by the same manners, possess a
reality for him, and inspire an actual friendship as of a man for a man.
His very admiration is the wind which fans and feeds his hope. The
poems themselves assume the properties of flesh and blood. To recite, to
extol, to contend for them is but the payment of a debt due to one, who
exists to receive it.
There are indeed modes of teaching which have produced, and are
producing, youths of a very different stamp; modes of teaching, in
comparison with which we have been called on to despise our great public
schools, and universities,
in whose halls are hung
Armoury of the invincible knights of old--
modes, by which children are to be metamorphosed into prodigies. And
prodigies with a vengeance have I known thus produced; prodigies of
self-conceit, shallowness, arrogance, and infidelity! Instead of
storing the memory, during the period when the memory is the predominant
faculty, with facts for the after exercise of the judgment; and instead
of awakening by the noblest models the fond and unmixed love and
admiration, which is the natural and graceful temper of early youth;
these nurslings of improved pedagogy are taught to dispute and decide;
to suspect all but their own and their lecturer's wisdom; and to
hold nothing sacred from their contempt, but their own contemptible
arrogance; boy-graduates in all the technicals, and in all the dirty
passions and impudence of anonymous criticism. To such dispositions
alone can the admonition of Pliny be requisite, Neque enim debet
operibus ejus obesse, quod vivit. An si inter eos, quos nunquam vidimus,
floruisset, non solum libros ejus, verum etiam imagines conquireremus,
ejusdem nunc honor prasentis, et gratia quasi satietate languescet?
At hoc pravum, malignumque est, non admirari hominem admiratione
dignissimum, quia videre, complecti, nec laudare tantum, verum etiam
amare contingit.
I had just entered on my seventeenth year, when the sonnets of Mr.
Bowles, twenty in number, and just then published in a quarto pamphlet,
were first made known and presented to me, by a schoolfellow who had
quitted us for the University, and who, during the whole time that he
was in our first form (or in our school language a Grecian,) had been my
patron and protector. I refer to Dr. Middleton, the truly learned, and
every way excellent Bishop of Calcutta:
qui laudibus amplis
Ingenium celebrare meum, calamumque solebat,
Calcar agens animo validum. Non omnia terra
Obruta; vivit amor, vivit dolor; ora negatur
Dulcia conspicere; at fiere et meminisse relictum est.
It was a double pleasure to me, and still remains a tender recollection,
that I should have received from a friend so revered the first knowledge
of a poet, by whose works, year after year, I was so enthusiastically
delighted and inspired. My earliest acquaintances will not have
forgotten the undisciplined eagerness and impetuous zeal, with which I
laboured to make proselytes, not only of my companions, but of all with
whom I conversed, of whatever rank, and in whatever place. As my school
finances did not permit me to purchase copies, I made, within less than
a year and a half, more than forty transcriptions, as the best presents
I could offer to those, who had in any way won my regard. And with
almost equal delight did I receive the three or four following
publications of the same author.
Though I have seen and known enough of mankind to be well aware, that
I shall perhaps stand alone in my creed, and that it will be well, if
I subject myself to no worse charge than that of singularity; I am not
therefore deterred from avowing, that I regard, and ever have regarded
the obligations of intellect among the most sacred of the claims of
gratitude. A valuable thought, or a particular train of thoughts, gives
me additional pleasure, when I can safely refer and attribute it to the
conversation or correspondence of another. My obligations to Mr. Bowles
were indeed important, and for radical good. At a very premature age,
even before my fifteenth year, I had bewildered myself in metaphysics,
and in theological controversy. Nothing else pleased me. History, and
particular facts, lost all interest in my mind. Poetry--(though for a
school-boy of that age, I was above par in English versification, and
had already produced two or three compositions which, I may venture to
say, without reference to my age, were somewhat above mediocrity, and
which had gained me more credit than the sound, good sense of my old
master was at all pleased with,)--poetry itself, yea, novels and
romances, became insipid to me. In my friendless wanderings on our
leave-days [4], (for I was an orphan, and had scarcely any connections
in London,) highly was I delighted, if any passenger, especially if he
were dressed in black, would enter into conversation with me. For I soon
found the means of directing it to my favourite subjects
Of providence, fore-knowledge, will, and fate,
Fixed fate, free will, fore-knowledge absolute,
And found no end in wandering mazes lost.
This preposterous pursuit was, beyond doubt, injurious both to my
natural powers, and to the progress of my education. It would perhaps
have been destructive, had it been continued; but from this I was
auspiciously withdrawn, partly indeed by an accidental introduction to
an amiable family, chiefly however, by the genial influence of a style
of poetry, so tender and yet so manly, so natural and real, and yet so
dignified and harmonious, as the sonnets and other early poems of Mr.
Bowles. Well would it have been for me, perhaps, had I never relapsed
into the same mental disease; if I had continued to pluck the flower and
reap the harvest from the cultivated surface, instead of delving in the
unwholesome quicksilver mines of metaphysic lore. And if in after time
I have sought a refuge from bodily pain and mismanaged sensibility in
abstruse researches, which exercised the strength and subtilty of the
understanding without awakening the feelings of the heart; still there
was a long and blessed interval, during which my natural faculties were
allowed to expand, and my original tendencies to develop themselves;--my
fancy, and the love of nature, and the sense of beauty in forms and
sounds.
The second advantage, which I owe to my early perusal, and admiration
of these poems, (to which let me add,) though known to me at a somewhat
later period, the Lewesdon Hill of Mr. Crowe bears more immediately on
my present subject. Among those with whom I conversed, there were,
of course, very many who had formed their taste, and their notions of
poetry, from the writings of Pope and his followers; or to speak more
generally, in that school of French poetry, condensed and invigorated by
English understanding, which had predominated from the last century. I
was not blind to the merits of this school, yet, as from inexperience of
the world, and consequent want of sympathy with the general subjects of
these poems, they gave me little pleasure, I doubtless undervalued the
kind, and with the presumption of youth withheld from its masters
the legitimate name of poets. I saw that the excellence of this kind
consisted in just and acute observations on men and manners in an
artificial state of society, as its matter and substance; and in the
logic of wit, conveyed in smooth and strong epigrammatic couplets, as
its form: that even when the subject was addressed to the fancy, or the
intellect, as in the Rape of the Lock, or the Essay on Man; nay, when it
was a consecutive narration, as in that astonishing product of matchless
talent and ingenuity Pope's Translation of the Iliad; still a point
was looked for at the end of each second line, and the whole was, as
it were, a sorites, or, if I may exchange a logical for a grammatical
metaphor, a conjunction disjunctive, of epigrams. Meantime the matter
and diction seemed to me characterized not so much by poetic thoughts,
as by thoughts translated into the language of poetry. On this last
point, I had occasion to render my own thoughts gradually more and
more plain to myself, by frequent amicable disputes concerning Darwin's
Botanic Garden, which, for some years, was greatly extolled, not only
by the reading public in general, but even by those, whose genius and
natural robustness of understanding enabled them afterwards to act
foremost in dissipating these "painted mists" that occasionally rise
from the marshes at the foot of Parnassus. During my first Cambridge
vacation, I assisted a friend in a contribution for a literary society
in Devonshire: and in this I remember to have compared Darwin's work to
the Russian palace of ice, glittering, cold and transitory. In the same
essay too, I assigned sundry reasons, chiefly drawn from a comparison
of passages in the Latin poets with the original Greek, from which they
were borrowed, for the preference of Collins's odes to those of Gray;
and of the simile in Shakespeare
How like a younker or a prodigal
The scarfed bark puts from her native bay,
Hugg'd and embraced by the strumpet wind!
How like the prodigal doth she return,
With over-weather'd ribs and ragged sails,
Lean, rent, and beggar'd by the strumpet wind!
(Merch. of Ven. Act II. sc. 6. )
to the imitation in the Bard;
Fair laughs the morn, and soft the zephyr blows
While proudly riding o'er the azure realm
In gallant trim the gilded vessel goes,
Youth at the prow and pleasure at the helm;
Regardless of the sweeping whirlwind's sway,
That hush'd in grim repose, expects it's evening prey.
(in which, by the bye, the words "realm" and "sway" are rhymes dearly
purchased)--I preferred the original on the ground, that in the
imitation it depended wholly on the compositor's putting, or not
putting, a small capital, both in this, and in many other passages of
the same poet, whether the words should be personifications, or mere
abstractions. I mention this, because, in referring various lines in
Gray to their original in Shakespeare and Milton, and in the clear
perception how completely all the propriety was lost in the transfer,
I was, at that early period, led to a conjecture, which, many years
afterwards was recalled to me from the same thought having been started
in conversation, but far more ably, and developed more fully, by
Mr. Wordsworth;--namely, that this style of poetry, which I have
characterized above, as translations of prose thoughts into poetic
language, had been kept up by, if it did not wholly arise from, the
custom of writing Latin verses, and the great importance attached to
these exercises, in our public schools. Whatever might have been the
case in the fifteenth century, when the use of the Latin tongue was so
general among learned men, that Erasmus is said to have forgotten his
native language; yet in the present day it is not to be supposed, that a
youth can think in Latin, or that he can have any other reliance on the
force or fitness of his phrases, but the authority of the writer
from whom he has adopted them. Consequently he must first prepare his
thoughts, and then pick out, from Virgil, Horace, Ovid, or perhaps more
compendiously from his Gradus, halves and quarters of lines, in which to
embody them.
I never object to a certain degree of disputatiousness in a young man
from the age of seventeen to that of four or five and twenty, provided I
find him always arguing on one side of the question. The controversies,
occasioned by my unfeigned zeal for the honour of a favourite
contemporary, then known to me only by his works, were of great
advantage in the formation and establishment of my taste and critical
opinions. In my defence of the lines running into each other, instead of
closing at each couplet; and of natural language, neither bookish, nor
vulgar, neither redolent of the lamp, nor of the kennel, such as I will
remember thee; instead of the same thought tricked up in the rag-fair
finery of,
------thy image on her wing
Before my fancy's eye shall memory bring,--
I had continually to adduce the metre and diction of the Greek poets,
from Homer to Theocritus inclusively; and still more of our elder
English poets, from Chaucer to Milton. Nor was this all. But as it was
my constant reply to authorities brought against me from later poets
of great name, that no authority could avail in opposition to Truth,
Nature, Logic, and the Laws of Universal Grammar; actuated too by my
former passion for metaphysical investigations; I laboured at a solid
foundation, on which permanently to ground my opinions, in the component
faculties of the human mind itself, and their comparative dignity and
importance. According to the faculty or source, from which the pleasure
given by any poem or passage was derived, I estimated the merit of
such poem or passage. As the result of all my reading and meditation,
I abstracted two critical aphorisms, deeming them to comprise the
conditions and criteria of poetic style;--first, that not the poem which
we have read, but that to which we return, with the greatest pleasure,
possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of essential
poetry;--secondly, that whatever lines can be translated into other
words of the same language, without diminution of their significance,
either in sense or association, or in any worthy feeling, are so far
vicious in their diction. Be it however observed, that I excluded from
the list of worthy feelings, the pleasure derived from mere novelty in
the reader, and the desire of exciting wonderment at his powers in the
author. Oftentimes since then, in pursuing French tragedies, I
have fancied two marks of admiration at the end of each line, as
hieroglyphics of the author's own admiration at his own cleverness.
Our genuine admiration of a great poet is a continuous undercurrent of
feeling! it is everywhere present, but seldom anywhere as a separate
excitement. I was wont boldly to affirm, that it would be scarcely more
difficult to push a stone out from the Pyramids with the bare hand, than
to alter a word, or the position of a word, in Milton or Shakespeare,
(in their most important works at least,) without making the poet
say something else, or something worse, than he does say. One great
distinction, I appeared to myself to see plainly between even the
characteristic faults of our elder poets, and the false beauty of the
moderns. In the former, from Donne to Cowley, we find the most fantastic
out-of-the-way thoughts, but in the most pure and genuine mother
English, in the latter the most obvious thoughts, in language the most
fantastic and arbitrary. Our faulty elder poets sacrificed the passion
and passionate flow of poetry to the subtleties of intellect and to the
stars of wit; the moderns to the glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet
broken and heterogeneous imagery, or rather to an amphibious something,
made up, half of image, and half of abstract [5] meaning. The one
sacrificed the heart to the head; the other both heart and head to point
and drapery.
The reader must make himself acquainted with the general style of
composition that was at that time deemed poetry, in order to understand
and account for the effect produced on me by the Sonnets, the Monody
at Matlock, and the Hope, of Mr. Bowles; for it is peculiar to original
genius to become less and less striking, in proportion to its success
in improving the taste and judgment of its contemporaries. The poems of
West, indeed, had the merit of chaste and manly diction; but they were
cold, and, if I may so express it, only dead-coloured; while in the
best of Warton's there is a stiffness, which too often gives them the
appearance of imitations from the Greek. Whatever relation, therefore,
of cause or impulse Percy's collection of Ballads may bear to the most
popular poems of the present day; yet in a more sustained and elevated
style, of the then living poets, Cowper and Bowles [6] were, to the best
of my knowledge, the first who combined natural thoughts with natural
diction; the first who reconciled the heart with the head.
It is true, as I have before mentioned, that from diffidence in my own
powers, I for a short time adopted a laborious and florid diction, which
I myself deemed, if not absolutely vicious, yet of very inferior worth.
Gradually, however, my practice conformed to my better judgment; and the
compositions of my twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth years--(for example,
the shorter blank verse poems, the lines, which now form the middle and
conclusion of the poem entitled the Destiny of Nations, and the tragedy
of Remorse)--are not more below my present ideal in respect of the
general tissue of the style than those of the latest date. Their faults
were at least a remnant of the former leaven, and among the many who
have done me the honour of putting my poems in the same class with those
of my betters, the one or two, who have pretended to bring examples of
affected simplicity from my volume, have been able to adduce but
one instance, and that out of a copy of verses half ludicrous, half
splenetic, which I intended, and had myself characterized, as sermoni
propiora.
Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an
excess, which will itself need reforming. The reader will excuse me for
noticing, that I myself was the first to expose risu honesto the three
sins of poetry, one or the other of which is the most likely to beset a
young writer. So long ago as the publication of the second number of the
Monthly Magazine, under the name of Nehemiah Higginbottom, I contributed
three sonnets, the first of which had for its object to excite a
good-natured laugh at the spirit of doleful egotism, and at the
recurrence of favourite phrases, with the double defect of being at
once trite and licentious;--the second was on low creeping language and
thoughts, under the pretence of simplicity; the third, the phrases of
which were borrowed entirely from my own poems, on the indiscriminate
use of elaborate and swelling language and imagery. The reader will find
them in the note [7] below, and will I trust regard them as reprinted
for biographical purposes alone, and not for their poetic merits. So
general at that time, and so decided was the opinion concerning the
characteristic vices of my style, that a celebrated physician (now,
alas! no more) speaking of me in other respects with his usual kindness,
to a gentleman, who was about to meet me at a dinner party, could not
however resist giving him a hint not to mention 'The house that Jack
built' in my presence, for "that I was as sore as a boil about that
sonnet;" he not knowing that I was myself the author of it.
CHAPTER II
Supposed irritability of men of genius brought to the test of
facts--Causes and occasions of the charge--Its injustice.
I have often thought, that it would be neither uninstructive nor
unamusing to analyze, and bring forward into distinct consciousness,
that complex feeling, with which readers in general take part against
the author, in favour of the critic; and the readiness with which they
apply to all poets the old sarcasm of Horace upon the scribblers of his
time
------genus irritabile vatum.
A debility and dimness of the imaginative power, and a consequent
necessity of reliance on the immediate impressions of the senses, do, we
know well, render the mind liable to superstition and fanaticism. Having
a deficient portion of internal and proper warmth, minds of this class
seek in the crowd circum fana for a warmth in common, which they do not
possess singly. Cold and phlegmatic in their own nature, like damp
hay, they heat and inflame by co-acervation; or like bees they become
restless and irritable through the increased temperature of collected
multitudes. Hence the German word for fanaticism, (such at least was
its original import,) is derived from the swarming of bees, namely,
schwaermen, schwaermerey. The passion being in an inverse proportion to
the insight,--that the more vivid, as this the less distinct--anger is
the inevitable consequence. The absense of all foundation within their
own minds for that, which they yet believe both true and indispensable
to their safety and happiness, cannot but produce an uneasy state of
feeling, an involuntary sense of fear from which nature has no means
of rescuing herself but by anger. Experience informs us that the first
defence of weak minds is to recriminate.
There's no philosopher but sees,
That rage and fear are one disease;
Tho' that may burn, and this may freeze,
They're both alike the ague.
But where the ideas are vivid, and there exists an endless power of
combining and modifying them, the feelings and affections blend more
easily and intimately with these ideal creations than with the objects
of the senses; the mind is affected by thoughts, rather than by things;
and only then feels the requisite interest even for the most important
events and accidents, when by means of meditation they have passed into
thoughts. The sanity of the mind is between superstition with fanaticism
on the one hand, and enthusiasm with indifference and a diseased
slowness to action on the other. For the conceptions of the mind may be
so vivid and adequate, as to preclude that impulse to the realizing of
them, which is strongest and most restless in those, who possess more
than mere talent, (or the faculty of appropriating and applying the
knowledge of others,)--yet still want something of the creative and
self-sufficing power of absolute genius. For this reason therefore,
they are men of commanding genius. While the former rest content between
thought and reality, as it were in an intermundium of which their
own living spirit supplies the substance, and their imagination the
ever-varying form; the latter must impress their preconceptions on the
world without, in order to present them back to their own view with the
satisfying degree of clearness, distinctness, and individuality. These
in tranquil times are formed to exhibit a perfect poem in palace, or
temple, or landscape-garden; or a tale of romance in canals that join
sea with sea, or in walls of rock, which, shouldering back the billows,
imitate the power, and supply the benevolence of nature to sheltered
navies; or in aqueducts that, arching the wide vale from mountain to
mountain, give a Palmyra to the desert. But alas! in times of tumult
they are the men destined to come forth as the shaping spirit of ruin,
to destroy the wisdom of ages in order to substitute the fancies of a
day, and to change kings and kingdoms, as the wind shifts and shapes the
clouds [8]. The records of biography seem to confirm this theory. The
men of the greatest genius, as far as we can judge from their own works
or from the accounts of their contemporaries, appear to have been of
calm and tranquil temper in all that related to themselves. In the
inward assurance of permanent fame, they seem to have been either
indifferent or resigned with regard to immediate reputation. Through all
the works of Chaucer there reigns a cheerfulness, a manly hilarity which
makes it almost impossible to doubt a correspondent habit of feeling in
the author himself. Shakespeare's evenness and sweetness of temper were
almost proverbial in his own age. That this did not arise from ignorance
of his own comparative greatness, we have abundant proof in his Sonnets,
which could scarcely have been known to Pope [9], when he asserted, that
our great bard--
------grew immortal in his own despite.
(Epist. to Augustus. )
Speaking of one whom he had celebrated, and contrasting the duration of
his works with that of his personal existence, Shakespeare adds:
Your name from hence immortal life shall have,
Tho' I once gone to all the world must die;
The earth can yield me but a common grave,
When you entombed in men's eyes shall lie.
Your monument shall be my gentle verse,
Which eyes not yet created shall o'er-read;
And tongues to be your being shall rehearse,
When all the breathers of this world are dead:
You still shall live, such virtue hath my pen,
Where breath most breathes, e'en in the mouth of men.
SONNET LXXXI.
I have taken the first that occurred; but Shakespeare's readiness to
praise his rivals, ore pleno, and the confidence of his own equality
with those whom he deemed most worthy of his praise, are alike
manifested in another Sonnet.
Was it the proud full sail of his great verse,
Bound for the praise of all-too-precious you,
That did my ripe thoughts in my brain inhearse,
Making their tomb, the womb wherein they grew?
Was it his spirit, by spirits taught to write
Above a mortal pitch that struck me dead?
No, neither he, nor his compeers by night
Giving him aid, my verse astonished.
He, nor that affable familiar ghost,
Which nightly gulls him with intelligence,
As victors of my silence cannot boast;
I was not sick of any fear from thence!
But when your countenance fill'd up his line,
Then lack'd I matter, that enfeebled mine.
S. LXXXVI.
In Spenser, indeed, we trace a mind constitutionally tender, delicate,
and, in comparison with his three great compeers, I had almost said,
effeminate; and this additionally saddened by the unjust persecution of
Burleigh, and the severe calamities, which overwhelmed his latter days.
It would perhaps
have been destructive, had it been continued; but from this I was
auspiciously withdrawn, partly indeed by an accidental introduction to
an amiable family, chiefly however, by the genial influence of a style
of poetry, so tender and yet so manly, so natural and real, and yet so
dignified and harmonious, as the sonnets and other early poems of Mr.
Bowles. Well would it have been for me, perhaps, had I never relapsed
into the same mental disease; if I had continued to pluck the flower and
reap the harvest from the cultivated surface, instead of delving in the
unwholesome quicksilver mines of metaphysic lore. And if in after time
I have sought a refuge from bodily pain and mismanaged sensibility in
abstruse researches, which exercised the strength and subtilty of the
understanding without awakening the feelings of the heart; still there
was a long and blessed interval, during which my natural faculties were
allowed to expand, and my original tendencies to develop themselves;--my
fancy, and the love of nature, and the sense of beauty in forms and
sounds.
The second advantage, which I owe to my early perusal, and admiration
of these poems, (to which let me add,) though known to me at a somewhat
later period, the Lewesdon Hill of Mr. Crowe bears more immediately on
my present subject. Among those with whom I conversed, there were,
of course, very many who had formed their taste, and their notions of
poetry, from the writings of Pope and his followers; or to speak more
generally, in that school of French poetry, condensed and invigorated by
English understanding, which had predominated from the last century. I
was not blind to the merits of this school, yet, as from inexperience of
the world, and consequent want of sympathy with the general subjects of
these poems, they gave me little pleasure, I doubtless undervalued the
kind, and with the presumption of youth withheld from its masters
the legitimate name of poets. I saw that the excellence of this kind
consisted in just and acute observations on men and manners in an
artificial state of society, as its matter and substance; and in the
logic of wit, conveyed in smooth and strong epigrammatic couplets, as
its form: that even when the subject was addressed to the fancy, or the
intellect, as in the Rape of the Lock, or the Essay on Man; nay, when it
was a consecutive narration, as in that astonishing product of matchless
talent and ingenuity Pope's Translation of the Iliad; still a point
was looked for at the end of each second line, and the whole was, as
it were, a sorites, or, if I may exchange a logical for a grammatical
metaphor, a conjunction disjunctive, of epigrams. Meantime the matter
and diction seemed to me characterized not so much by poetic thoughts,
as by thoughts translated into the language of poetry. On this last
point, I had occasion to render my own thoughts gradually more and
more plain to myself, by frequent amicable disputes concerning Darwin's
Botanic Garden, which, for some years, was greatly extolled, not only
by the reading public in general, but even by those, whose genius and
natural robustness of understanding enabled them afterwards to act
foremost in dissipating these "painted mists" that occasionally rise
from the marshes at the foot of Parnassus. During my first Cambridge
vacation, I assisted a friend in a contribution for a literary society
in Devonshire: and in this I remember to have compared Darwin's work to
the Russian palace of ice, glittering, cold and transitory. In the same
essay too, I assigned sundry reasons, chiefly drawn from a comparison
of passages in the Latin poets with the original Greek, from which they
were borrowed, for the preference of Collins's odes to those of Gray;
and of the simile in Shakespeare
How like a younker or a prodigal
The scarfed bark puts from her native bay,
Hugg'd and embraced by the strumpet wind!
How like the prodigal doth she return,
With over-weather'd ribs and ragged sails,
Lean, rent, and beggar'd by the strumpet wind!
(Merch. of Ven. Act II. sc. 6. )
to the imitation in the Bard;
Fair laughs the morn, and soft the zephyr blows
While proudly riding o'er the azure realm
In gallant trim the gilded vessel goes,
Youth at the prow and pleasure at the helm;
Regardless of the sweeping whirlwind's sway,
That hush'd in grim repose, expects it's evening prey.
(in which, by the bye, the words "realm" and "sway" are rhymes dearly
purchased)--I preferred the original on the ground, that in the
imitation it depended wholly on the compositor's putting, or not
putting, a small capital, both in this, and in many other passages of
the same poet, whether the words should be personifications, or mere
abstractions. I mention this, because, in referring various lines in
Gray to their original in Shakespeare and Milton, and in the clear
perception how completely all the propriety was lost in the transfer,
I was, at that early period, led to a conjecture, which, many years
afterwards was recalled to me from the same thought having been started
in conversation, but far more ably, and developed more fully, by
Mr. Wordsworth;--namely, that this style of poetry, which I have
characterized above, as translations of prose thoughts into poetic
language, had been kept up by, if it did not wholly arise from, the
custom of writing Latin verses, and the great importance attached to
these exercises, in our public schools. Whatever might have been the
case in the fifteenth century, when the use of the Latin tongue was so
general among learned men, that Erasmus is said to have forgotten his
native language; yet in the present day it is not to be supposed, that a
youth can think in Latin, or that he can have any other reliance on the
force or fitness of his phrases, but the authority of the writer
from whom he has adopted them. Consequently he must first prepare his
thoughts, and then pick out, from Virgil, Horace, Ovid, or perhaps more
compendiously from his Gradus, halves and quarters of lines, in which to
embody them.
I never object to a certain degree of disputatiousness in a young man
from the age of seventeen to that of four or five and twenty, provided I
find him always arguing on one side of the question. The controversies,
occasioned by my unfeigned zeal for the honour of a favourite
contemporary, then known to me only by his works, were of great
advantage in the formation and establishment of my taste and critical
opinions. In my defence of the lines running into each other, instead of
closing at each couplet; and of natural language, neither bookish, nor
vulgar, neither redolent of the lamp, nor of the kennel, such as I will
remember thee; instead of the same thought tricked up in the rag-fair
finery of,
------thy image on her wing
Before my fancy's eye shall memory bring,--
I had continually to adduce the metre and diction of the Greek poets,
from Homer to Theocritus inclusively; and still more of our elder
English poets, from Chaucer to Milton. Nor was this all. But as it was
my constant reply to authorities brought against me from later poets
of great name, that no authority could avail in opposition to Truth,
Nature, Logic, and the Laws of Universal Grammar; actuated too by my
former passion for metaphysical investigations; I laboured at a solid
foundation, on which permanently to ground my opinions, in the component
faculties of the human mind itself, and their comparative dignity and
importance. According to the faculty or source, from which the pleasure
given by any poem or passage was derived, I estimated the merit of
such poem or passage. As the result of all my reading and meditation,
I abstracted two critical aphorisms, deeming them to comprise the
conditions and criteria of poetic style;--first, that not the poem which
we have read, but that to which we return, with the greatest pleasure,
possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of essential
poetry;--secondly, that whatever lines can be translated into other
words of the same language, without diminution of their significance,
either in sense or association, or in any worthy feeling, are so far
vicious in their diction. Be it however observed, that I excluded from
the list of worthy feelings, the pleasure derived from mere novelty in
the reader, and the desire of exciting wonderment at his powers in the
author. Oftentimes since then, in pursuing French tragedies, I
have fancied two marks of admiration at the end of each line, as
hieroglyphics of the author's own admiration at his own cleverness.
Our genuine admiration of a great poet is a continuous undercurrent of
feeling! it is everywhere present, but seldom anywhere as a separate
excitement. I was wont boldly to affirm, that it would be scarcely more
difficult to push a stone out from the Pyramids with the bare hand, than
to alter a word, or the position of a word, in Milton or Shakespeare,
(in their most important works at least,) without making the poet
say something else, or something worse, than he does say. One great
distinction, I appeared to myself to see plainly between even the
characteristic faults of our elder poets, and the false beauty of the
moderns. In the former, from Donne to Cowley, we find the most fantastic
out-of-the-way thoughts, but in the most pure and genuine mother
English, in the latter the most obvious thoughts, in language the most
fantastic and arbitrary. Our faulty elder poets sacrificed the passion
and passionate flow of poetry to the subtleties of intellect and to the
stars of wit; the moderns to the glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet
broken and heterogeneous imagery, or rather to an amphibious something,
made up, half of image, and half of abstract [5] meaning. The one
sacrificed the heart to the head; the other both heart and head to point
and drapery.
The reader must make himself acquainted with the general style of
composition that was at that time deemed poetry, in order to understand
and account for the effect produced on me by the Sonnets, the Monody
at Matlock, and the Hope, of Mr. Bowles; for it is peculiar to original
genius to become less and less striking, in proportion to its success
in improving the taste and judgment of its contemporaries. The poems of
West, indeed, had the merit of chaste and manly diction; but they were
cold, and, if I may so express it, only dead-coloured; while in the
best of Warton's there is a stiffness, which too often gives them the
appearance of imitations from the Greek. Whatever relation, therefore,
of cause or impulse Percy's collection of Ballads may bear to the most
popular poems of the present day; yet in a more sustained and elevated
style, of the then living poets, Cowper and Bowles [6] were, to the best
of my knowledge, the first who combined natural thoughts with natural
diction; the first who reconciled the heart with the head.
It is true, as I have before mentioned, that from diffidence in my own
powers, I for a short time adopted a laborious and florid diction, which
I myself deemed, if not absolutely vicious, yet of very inferior worth.
Gradually, however, my practice conformed to my better judgment; and the
compositions of my twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth years--(for example,
the shorter blank verse poems, the lines, which now form the middle and
conclusion of the poem entitled the Destiny of Nations, and the tragedy
of Remorse)--are not more below my present ideal in respect of the
general tissue of the style than those of the latest date. Their faults
were at least a remnant of the former leaven, and among the many who
have done me the honour of putting my poems in the same class with those
of my betters, the one or two, who have pretended to bring examples of
affected simplicity from my volume, have been able to adduce but
one instance, and that out of a copy of verses half ludicrous, half
splenetic, which I intended, and had myself characterized, as sermoni
propiora.
Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an
excess, which will itself need reforming. The reader will excuse me for
noticing, that I myself was the first to expose risu honesto the three
sins of poetry, one or the other of which is the most likely to beset a
young writer. So long ago as the publication of the second number of the
Monthly Magazine, under the name of Nehemiah Higginbottom, I contributed
three sonnets, the first of which had for its object to excite a
good-natured laugh at the spirit of doleful egotism, and at the
recurrence of favourite phrases, with the double defect of being at
once trite and licentious;--the second was on low creeping language and
thoughts, under the pretence of simplicity; the third, the phrases of
which were borrowed entirely from my own poems, on the indiscriminate
use of elaborate and swelling language and imagery. The reader will find
them in the note [7] below, and will I trust regard them as reprinted
for biographical purposes alone, and not for their poetic merits. So
general at that time, and so decided was the opinion concerning the
characteristic vices of my style, that a celebrated physician (now,
alas! no more) speaking of me in other respects with his usual kindness,
to a gentleman, who was about to meet me at a dinner party, could not
however resist giving him a hint not to mention 'The house that Jack
built' in my presence, for "that I was as sore as a boil about that
sonnet;" he not knowing that I was myself the author of it.
CHAPTER II
Supposed irritability of men of genius brought to the test of
facts--Causes and occasions of the charge--Its injustice.
I have often thought, that it would be neither uninstructive nor
unamusing to analyze, and bring forward into distinct consciousness,
that complex feeling, with which readers in general take part against
the author, in favour of the critic; and the readiness with which they
apply to all poets the old sarcasm of Horace upon the scribblers of his
time
------genus irritabile vatum.
A debility and dimness of the imaginative power, and a consequent
necessity of reliance on the immediate impressions of the senses, do, we
know well, render the mind liable to superstition and fanaticism. Having
a deficient portion of internal and proper warmth, minds of this class
seek in the crowd circum fana for a warmth in common, which they do not
possess singly. Cold and phlegmatic in their own nature, like damp
hay, they heat and inflame by co-acervation; or like bees they become
restless and irritable through the increased temperature of collected
multitudes. Hence the German word for fanaticism, (such at least was
its original import,) is derived from the swarming of bees, namely,
schwaermen, schwaermerey. The passion being in an inverse proportion to
the insight,--that the more vivid, as this the less distinct--anger is
the inevitable consequence. The absense of all foundation within their
own minds for that, which they yet believe both true and indispensable
to their safety and happiness, cannot but produce an uneasy state of
feeling, an involuntary sense of fear from which nature has no means
of rescuing herself but by anger. Experience informs us that the first
defence of weak minds is to recriminate.
There's no philosopher but sees,
That rage and fear are one disease;
Tho' that may burn, and this may freeze,
They're both alike the ague.
But where the ideas are vivid, and there exists an endless power of
combining and modifying them, the feelings and affections blend more
easily and intimately with these ideal creations than with the objects
of the senses; the mind is affected by thoughts, rather than by things;
and only then feels the requisite interest even for the most important
events and accidents, when by means of meditation they have passed into
thoughts. The sanity of the mind is between superstition with fanaticism
on the one hand, and enthusiasm with indifference and a diseased
slowness to action on the other. For the conceptions of the mind may be
so vivid and adequate, as to preclude that impulse to the realizing of
them, which is strongest and most restless in those, who possess more
than mere talent, (or the faculty of appropriating and applying the
knowledge of others,)--yet still want something of the creative and
self-sufficing power of absolute genius. For this reason therefore,
they are men of commanding genius. While the former rest content between
thought and reality, as it were in an intermundium of which their
own living spirit supplies the substance, and their imagination the
ever-varying form; the latter must impress their preconceptions on the
world without, in order to present them back to their own view with the
satisfying degree of clearness, distinctness, and individuality. These
in tranquil times are formed to exhibit a perfect poem in palace, or
temple, or landscape-garden; or a tale of romance in canals that join
sea with sea, or in walls of rock, which, shouldering back the billows,
imitate the power, and supply the benevolence of nature to sheltered
navies; or in aqueducts that, arching the wide vale from mountain to
mountain, give a Palmyra to the desert. But alas! in times of tumult
they are the men destined to come forth as the shaping spirit of ruin,
to destroy the wisdom of ages in order to substitute the fancies of a
day, and to change kings and kingdoms, as the wind shifts and shapes the
clouds [8]. The records of biography seem to confirm this theory. The
men of the greatest genius, as far as we can judge from their own works
or from the accounts of their contemporaries, appear to have been of
calm and tranquil temper in all that related to themselves. In the
inward assurance of permanent fame, they seem to have been either
indifferent or resigned with regard to immediate reputation. Through all
the works of Chaucer there reigns a cheerfulness, a manly hilarity which
makes it almost impossible to doubt a correspondent habit of feeling in
the author himself. Shakespeare's evenness and sweetness of temper were
almost proverbial in his own age. That this did not arise from ignorance
of his own comparative greatness, we have abundant proof in his Sonnets,
which could scarcely have been known to Pope [9], when he asserted, that
our great bard--
------grew immortal in his own despite.
(Epist. to Augustus. )
Speaking of one whom he had celebrated, and contrasting the duration of
his works with that of his personal existence, Shakespeare adds:
Your name from hence immortal life shall have,
Tho' I once gone to all the world must die;
The earth can yield me but a common grave,
When you entombed in men's eyes shall lie.
Your monument shall be my gentle verse,
Which eyes not yet created shall o'er-read;
And tongues to be your being shall rehearse,
When all the breathers of this world are dead:
You still shall live, such virtue hath my pen,
Where breath most breathes, e'en in the mouth of men.
SONNET LXXXI.
I have taken the first that occurred; but Shakespeare's readiness to
praise his rivals, ore pleno, and the confidence of his own equality
with those whom he deemed most worthy of his praise, are alike
manifested in another Sonnet.
Was it the proud full sail of his great verse,
Bound for the praise of all-too-precious you,
That did my ripe thoughts in my brain inhearse,
Making their tomb, the womb wherein they grew?
Was it his spirit, by spirits taught to write
Above a mortal pitch that struck me dead?
No, neither he, nor his compeers by night
Giving him aid, my verse astonished.
He, nor that affable familiar ghost,
Which nightly gulls him with intelligence,
As victors of my silence cannot boast;
I was not sick of any fear from thence!
But when your countenance fill'd up his line,
Then lack'd I matter, that enfeebled mine.
S. LXXXVI.
In Spenser, indeed, we trace a mind constitutionally tender, delicate,
and, in comparison with his three great compeers, I had almost said,
effeminate; and this additionally saddened by the unjust persecution of
Burleigh, and the severe calamities, which overwhelmed his latter days.
These causes have diffused over all his compositions "a melancholy
grace," and have drawn forth occasional strains, the more pathetic
from their gentleness. But no where do we find the least trace of
irritability, and still less of quarrelsome or affected contempt of his
censurers.
The same calmness, and even greater self-possession, may be affirmed
of Milton, as far as his poems, and poetic character are concerned.
He reserved his anger for the enemies of religion, freedom, and his
country. My mind is not capable of forming a more august conception,
than arises from the contemplation of this great man in his latter
days;--poor, sick, old, blind, slandered, persecuted,--
Darkness before, and danger's voice behind,--
in an age in which he was as little understood by the party, for whom,
as by that against whom, he had contended; and among men before whom he
strode so far as to dwarf himself by the distance; yet still listening
to the music of his own thoughts, or if additionally cheered,
yet cheered only by the prophetic faith of two or three solitary
individuals, he did nevertheless
------argue not
Against Heaven's hand or will, nor bate a jot
Of heart or hope; but still bore up and steer'd
Right onward.
From others only do we derive our knowledge that Milton, in his latter
day, had his scorners and detractors; and even in his day of youth and
hope, that he had enemies would have been unknown to us, had they not
been likewise the enemies of his country.
I am well aware, that in advanced stages of literature, when there exist
many and excellent models, a high degree of talent, combined with taste
and judgment, and employed in works of imagination, will acquire for
a man the name of a great genius; though even that analogon of genius,
which, in certain states of society, may even render his writings more
popular than the absolute reality could have done, would be sought
for in vain in the mind and temper of the author himself. Yet even in
instances of this kind, a close examination will often detect, that the
irritability, which has been attributed to the author's genius as its
cause, did really originate in an ill conformation of body, obtuse pain,
or constitutional defect of pleasurable sensation. What is charged to
the author, belongs to the man, who would probably have been still more
impatient, but for the humanizing influences of the very pursuit, which
yet bears the blame of his irritability.
How then are we to explain the easy credence generally given to this
charge, if the charge itself be not, as I have endeavoured to show,
supported by experience? This seems to me of no very difficult solution.
In whatever country literature is widely diffused, there will be many
who mistake an intense desire to possess the reputation of poetic
genius, for the actual powers, and original tendencies which constitute
it. But men, whose dearest wishes are fixed on objects wholly out of
their own power, become in all cases more or less impatient and prone to
anger. Besides, though it may be paradoxical to assert, that a man can
know one thing and believe the opposite, yet assuredly a vain person may
have so habitually indulged the wish, and persevered in the attempt, to
appear what he is not, as to become himself one of his own proselytes.
Still, as this counterfeit and artificial persuasion must differ, even
in the person's own feelings, from a real sense of inward power, what
can be more natural, than that this difference should betray itself
in suspicious and jealous irritability? Even as the flowery sod, which
covers a hollow, may be often detected by its shaking and trembling.
But, alas! the multitude of books and the general diffusion of
literature, have produced other and more lamentable effects in the world
of letters, and such as are abundant to explain, though by no means to
justify, the contempt with which the best grounded complaints of injured
genius are rejected as frivolous, or entertained as matter of merriment.
In the days of Chaucer and Gower, our language might (with due allowance
for the imperfections of a simile) be compared to a wilderness of vocal
reeds, from which the favourites only of Pan or Apollo could construct
even the rude syrinx; and from this the constructors alone could elicit
strains of music. But now, partly by the labours of successive
poets, and in part by the more artificial state of society and social
intercourse, language, mechanized as it were into a barrel-organ,
supplies at once both instrument and tune. Thus even the deaf may play,
so as to delight the many. Sometimes (for it is with similes, as it
is with jests at a wine table, one is sure to suggest another) I have
attempted to illustrate the present state of our language, in its
relation to literature, by a press-room of larger and smaller stereotype
pieces, which, in the present Anglo-Gallican fashion of unconnected,
epigrammatic periods, it requires but an ordinary portion of ingenuity
to vary indefinitely, and yet still produce something, which, if not
sense, will be so like it as to do as well. Perhaps better: for it
spares the reader the trouble of thinking; prevents vacancy, while
it indulges indolence; and secures the memory from all danger of an
intellectual plethora. Hence of all trades, literature at present
demands the least talent or information; and, of all modes of
literature, the manufacturing of poems. The difference indeed between
these and the works of genius is not less than between an egg and an
egg-shell; yet at a distance they both look alike.
Now it is no less remarkable than true, with how little examination
works of polite literature are commonly perused, not only by the mass of
readers, but by men of first rate ability, till some accident or chance
[10] discussion have roused their attention, and put them on their
guard. And hence individuals below mediocrity not less in natural power
than in acquired knowledge; nay, bunglers who have failed in the lowest
mechanic crafts, and whose presumption is in due proportion to their
want of sense and sensibility; men, who being first scribblers
from idleness and ignorance, next become libellers from envy and
malevolence,--have been able to drive a successful trade in the
employment of the booksellers, nay, have raised themselves into
temporary name and reputation with the public at large, by that most
powerful of all adulation, the appeal to the bad and malignant passions
of mankind [11]. But as it is the nature of scorn, envy, and all
malignant propensities to require a quick change of objects, such
writers are sure, sooner or later, to awake from their dream of vanity
to disappointment and neglect with embittered and envenomed feelings.
Even during their short-lived success, sensible in spite of themselves
on what a shifting foundation it rests, they resent the mere refusal
of praise as a robbery, and at the justest censures kindle at once into
violent and undisciplined abuse; till the acute disease changing into
chronical, the more deadly as the less violent, they become the fit
instruments of literary detraction and moral slander. They are then no
longer to be questioned without exposing the complainant to ridicule,
because, forsooth, they are anonymous critics, and authorized, in Andrew
Marvell's phrase, as "synodical individuals" to speak of themselves
plurali majestatico! As if literature formed a caste, like that of
the Paras in Hindostan, who, however maltreated, must not dare to deem
themselves wronged! As if that, which in all other cases adds a deeper
dye to slander, the circumstance of its being anonymous, here acted
only to make the slanderer inviolable! [12] Thus, in part, from the
accidental tempers of individuals--(men of undoubted talent, but not
men of genius)--tempers rendered yet more irritable by their desire to
appear men of genius; but still more effectively by the excesses of the
mere counterfeits both of talent and genius; the number too being so
incomparably greater of those who are thought to be, than of those
who really are men of genius; and in part from the natural, but not
therefore the less partial and unjust distinction, made by the public
itself between literary and all other property; I believe the prejudice
to have arisen, which considers an unusual irascibility concerning the
reception of its products as characteristic of genius.
It might correct the moral feelings of a numerous class of readers, to
suppose a Review set on foot, the object of which should be to criticise
all the chief works presented to the public by our ribbon-weavers,
calico-printers, cabinet-makers, and china-manufacturers; which should
be conducted in the same spirit, and take the same freedom with personal
character, as our literary journals. They would scarcely, I think,
deny their belief, not only that the genus irritabile would be found
to include many other species besides that of bards; but that the
irritability of trade would soon reduce the resentments of poets into
mere shadow-fights in the comparison. Or is wealth the only rational
object of human interest? Or even if this were admitted, has the poet
no property in his works? Or is it a rare, or culpable case, that he
who serves at the altar of the Muses, should be compelled to derive
his maintenance from the altar, when too he has perhaps deliberately
abandoned the fairest prospects of rank and opulence in order to
devote himself, an entire and undistracted man, to the instruction or
refinement of his fellow-citizens? Or, should we pass by all higher
objects and motives, all disinterested benevolence, and even that
ambition of lasting praise which is at once the crutch and ornament,
which at once supports and betrays, the infirmity of human virtue,--is
the character and property of the man, who labours for our intellectual
pleasures, less entitled to a share of our fellow feeling, than that of
the wine-merchant or milliner? Sensibility indeed, both quick and deep,
is not only a characteristic feature, but may be deemed a component
part, of genius. But it is not less an essential mark of true genius,
that its sensibility is excited by any other cause more powerfully than
by its own personal interests; for this plain reason, that the man of
genius lives most in the ideal world, in which the present is still
constituted by the future or the past; and because his feelings have
been habitually associated with thoughts and images, to the number,
clearness, and vivacity of which the sensation of self is always in an
inverse proportion. And yet, should he perchance have occasion to repel
some false charge, or to rectify some erroneous censure, nothing is more
common than for the many to mistake the general liveliness of his manner
and language, whatever is the subject, for the effects of peculiar
irritation from its accidental relation to himself. [13]
For myself, if from my own feelings, or from the less suspicious test
of the observations of others, I had been made aware of any literary
testiness or jealousy; I trust, that I should have been, however,
neither silly nor arrogant enough to have burthened the imperfection on
genius. But an experience--(and I should not need documents in abundance
to prove my words, if I added)--a tried experience of twenty years, has
taught me, that the original sin of my character consists in a careless
indifference to public opinion, and to the attacks of those who
influence it; that praise and admiration have become yearly less and
less desirable, except as marks of sympathy; nay that it is difficult
and distressing to me to think with any interest even about the sale
and profit of my works, important as, in my present circumstances, such
considerations must needs be. Yet it never occurred to me to believe or
fancy, that the quantum of intellectual power bestowed on me by nature
or education was in any way connected with this habit of my feelings;
or that it needed any other parents or fosterers than constitutional
indolence, aggravated into languor by ill-health; the accumulating
embarrassments of procrastination; the mental cowardice, which is the
inseparable companion of procrastination, and which makes us anxious to
think and converse on any thing rather than on what concerns ourselves;
in fine, all those close vexations, whether chargeable on my faults
or my fortunes, which leave me but little grief to spare for evils
comparatively distant and alien.
Indignation at literary wrongs I leave to men born under happier stars.
I cannot afford it. But so far from condemning those who can, I deem
it a writer's duty, and think it creditable to his heart, to feel and
express a resentment proportioned to the grossness of the provocation,
and the importance of the object. There is no profession on earth, which
requires an attention so early, so long, or so unintermitting as that of
poetry; and indeed as that of literary composition in general, if it be
such as at all satisfies the demands both of taste and of sound logic.
How difficult and delicate a task even the mere mechanism of verse is,
may be conjectured from the failure of those, who have attempted poetry
late in life. Where then a man has, from his earliest youth, devoted
his whole being to an object, which by the admission of all civilized
nations in all ages is honourable as a pursuit, and glorious as an
attainment; what of all that relates to himself and his family, if only
we except his moral character, can have fairer claims to his protection,
or more authorize acts of self-defence, than the elaborate products of
his intellect and intellectual industry? Prudence itself would command
us to show, even if defect or diversion of natural sensibility had
prevented us from feeling, a due interest and qualified anxiety for the
offspring and representatives of our nobler being. I know it, alas! by
woful experience. I have laid too many eggs in the hot sands of this
wilderness, the world, with ostrich carelessness and ostrich oblivion.
The greater part indeed have been trod under foot, and are forgotten;
but yet no small number have crept forth into life, some to furnish
feathers for the caps of others, and still more to plume the shafts in
the quivers of my enemies, of them that unprovoked have lain in wait
against my soul.
Sic vos, non vobis, mellificatis, apes!
CHAPTER III
The Author's obligations to critics, and the probable
occasion--Principles of modern criticism--Mr. Southey's works and
character.
To anonymous critics in reviews, magazines, and news-journals of various
name and rank, and to satirists with or without a name in verse or
prose, or in verse-text aided by prose-comment, I do seriously believe
and profess, that I owe full two-thirds of whatever reputation and
publicity I happen to possess. For when the name of an individual has
occurred so frequently, in so many works, for so great a length of time,
the readers of these works--(which with a shelf or two of beauties,
elegant Extracts and Anas, form nine-tenths of the reading of the
reading Public [14])--cannot but be familiar with the name, without
distinctly remembering whether it was introduced for eulogy or for
censure. And this becomes the more likely, if (as I believe) the
habit of perusing periodical works may be properly added to Averroes'
catalogue of Anti-Mnemonics, or weakeners of the memory [15]. But where
this has not been the case, yet the reader will be apt to suspect that
there must be something more than usually strong and extensive in
a reputation, that could either require or stand so merciless
and long-continued a cannonading. Without any feeling of anger
therefore--(for which indeed, on my own account, I have no pretext)--I
may yet be allowed to express some degree of surprise, that, after
having run the critical gauntlet for a certain class of faults which
I had, nothing having come before the judgment-seat in the interim, I
should, year after year, quarter after quarter, month after month--(not
to mention sundry petty periodicals of still quicker revolution,
"or weekly or diurnal")--have been, for at least seventeen years
consecutively, dragged forth by them into the foremost ranks of the
proscribed, and forced to abide the brunt of abuse, for faults directly
opposite, and which I certainly had not. How shall I explain this?
Whatever may have been the case with others, I certainly cannot
attribute this persecution to personal dislike, or to envy, or to
feelings of vindictive animosity. Not to the former, for with the
exception of a very few who are my intimate friends, and were so before
they were known as authors, I have had little other acquaintance
with literary characters, than what may be implied in an accidental
introduction, or casual meeting in a mixed company. And as far as words
and looks can be trusted, I must believe that, even in these instances,
I had excited no unfriendly disposition. Neither by letter, nor in
conversation, have I ever had dispute or controversy beyond the common
social interchange of opinions. Nay, where I had reason to suppose my
convictions fundamentally different, it has been my habit, and I may
add, the impulse of my nature, to assign the grounds of my belief,
rather than the belief itself; and not to express dissent, till I could
establish some points of complete sympathy, some grounds common to both
sides, from which to commence its explanation.
Still less can I place these attacks to the charge of envy. The few
pages which I have published, are of too distant a date, and the extent
of their sale a proof too conclusive against their having been popular
at any time, to render probable, I had almost said possible, the
excitement of envy on their account; and the man who should envy me on
any other, verily he must be envy-mad!
Lastly, with as little semblance of reason, could I suspect any
animosity towards me from vindictive feelings as the cause. I have
before said, that my acquaintance with literary men has been limited and
distant; and that I have had neither dispute nor controversy. From my
first entrance into life, I have, with few and short intervals, lived
either abroad or in retirement. My different essays on subjects of
national interest, published at different times, first in the Morning
Post and then in the Courier, with my courses of Lectures on the
principles of criticism as applied to Shakespeare and Milton, constitute
my whole publicity; the only occasions on which I could offend any
member of the republic of letters. With one solitary exception in
which my words were first misstated and then wantonly applied to an
individual, I could never learn that I had excited the displeasure of
any among my literary contemporaries. Having announced my intention to
give a course of Lectures on the characteristic merits and defects of
English poetry in its different aeras; first, from Chaucer to Milton;
second, from Dryden inclusively to Thomson; and third, from Cowper to
the present day; I changed my plan, and confined my disquisition to the
former two periods, that I might furnish no possible pretext for the
unthinking to misconstrue, or the malignant to misapply my words, and
having stamped their own meaning on them, to pass them as current coin
in the marts of garrulity or detraction.
Praises of the unworthy are felt by ardent minds as robberies of the
deserving; and it is too true, and too frequent, that Bacon, Harrington,
Machiavel, and Spinoza, are not read, because Hume, Condillac, and
Voltaire are. But in promiscuous company no prudent man will oppugn
the merits of a contemporary in his own supposed department; contenting
himself with praising in his turn those whom he deems excellent. If
I should ever deem it my duty at all to oppose the pretensions of
individuals, I would oppose them in books which could be weighed and
answered, in which I could evolve the whole of my reasons and feelings,
with their requisite limits and modifications; not in irrecoverable
conversation, where however strong the reasons might be, the feelings
that prompted them would assuredly be attributed by some one or other
to envy and discontent. Besides I well know, and, I trust, have acted on
that knowledge, that it must be the ignorant and injudicious who extol
the unworthy; and the eulogies of critics without taste or judgment are
the natural reward of authors without feeling or genius. Sint unicuique
sua praemia.
How then, dismissing, as I do, these three causes, am I to account for
attacks, the long continuance and inveteracy of which it would require
all three to explain? The solution seems to be this,--I was in habits of
intimacy with Mr. Wordsworth and Mr. Southey! This, however, transfers,
rather than removes the difficulty. Be it, that, by an unconscionable
extension of the old adage, noscitur a socio, my literary friends are
never under the water-fall of criticism, but I must be wet through with
the spray; yet how came the torrent to descend upon them?
First then, with regard to Mr. Southey. I well remember the general
reception of his earlier publications; namely, the poems published with
Mr. Lovell under the names of Moschus and Bion; the two volumes of poems
under his own name, and the Joan of Arc. The censures of the critics by
profession are extant, and may be easily referred to:--careless lines,
inequality in the merit of the different poems, and (in the lighter
works) a predilection for the strange and whimsical; in short, such
faults as might have been anticipated in a young and rapid writer, were
indeed sufficiently enforced. Nor was there at that time wanting a party
spirit to aggravate the defects of a poet, who with all the courage of
uncorrupted youth had avowed his zeal for a cause, which he deemed
that of liberty, and his abhorrence of oppression by whatever name
consecrated. But it was as little objected by others, as dreamed of by
the poet himself, that he preferred careless and prosaic lines on rule
and of forethought, or indeed that he pretended to any other art or
theory of poetic diction, except that which we may all learn from
Horace, Quinctilian, the admirable dialogue, De Oratoribus, generally
attributed to Tacitus, or Strada's Prolusions; if indeed natural good
sense and the early study of the best models in his own language had
not infused the same maxims more securely, and, if I may venture the
expression, more vitally. All that could have been fairly deduced was,
that in his taste and estimation of writers Mr. Southey agreed far more
with Thomas Warton, than with Dr. Johnson. Nor do I mean to deny, that
at all times Mr. Southey was of the same mind with Sir Philip Sidney in
preferring an excellent ballad in the humblest style of poetry to twenty
indifferent poems that strutted in the highest. And by what have his
works, published since then, been characterized, each more strikingly
than the preceding, but by greater splendour, a deeper pathos,
profounder reflections, and a more sustained dignity of language and of
metre? Distant may the period be, but whenever the time shall come,
when all his works shall be collected by some editor worthy to be his
biographer, I trust that an appendix of excerpta of all the passages,
in which his writings, name, and character have been attacked, from
the pamphlets and periodical works of the last twenty years, may be an
accompaniment. Yet that it would prove medicinal in after times I dare
not hope; for as long as there are readers to be delighted with calumny,
there will be found reviewers to calumniate. And such readers will
become in all probability more numerous, in proportion as a still
greater diffusion of literature shall produce an increase of sciolists,
and sciolism bring with it petulance and presumption. In times of old,
books were as religious oracles; as literature advanced, they next
became venerable preceptors; they then descended to the rank of
instructive friends; and, as their numbers increased, they sank still
lower to that of entertaining companions; and at present they seem
degraded into culprits to hold up their hands at the bar of every
self-elected, yet not the less peremptory, judge, who chooses to write
from humour or interest, from enmity or arrogance, and to abide the
decision "of him that reads in malice, or him that reads after dinner. "
The same retrograde movement may be traced, in the relation which the
authors themselves have assumed towards their readers. From the lofty
address of Bacon: "these are the meditations of Francis of Verulam,
which that posterity should be possessed of, he deemed their interest:"
or from dedication to Monarch or Pontiff, in which the honour given was
asserted in equipoise to the patronage acknowledged: from Pindar's
------'ep' alloi--
si d'alloi megaloi: to d'eschaton kory-
phoutai basilensi. Maeketi
paptaine porsion.
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Title: Biographia Literaria
Author: Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Release Date: July, 2004 [EBook #6081]
Last Updated: August 10, 2012
Language: English
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BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA
By Samuel Taylor Coleridge
LIST OF CONTENTS
CHAP.
I Motives to the present work--Reception of the Author's first
publication--Discipline of his taste at school--Effect of
contemporary writers on youthful minds--Bowles's Sonnets--
Comparison between the poets before and since
II Supposed irritability of genius brought to the test of
facts--Causes and occasions of the charge--Its injustice
III The Author's obligations to Critics, and the probable
occasion--Principles of modern criticism--Mr. Southey's
works and character
IV The Lyrical Ballads with the Preface--Mr. Wordsworth's
earlier poems--On Fancy and Imagination--The investigation
of the distinction important to the Fine Arts
V On the law of Association--Its history traced from Aristotle
to Hartley
VI That Hartley's system, as far as it differs from that of
Aristotle, is neither tenable in theory, nor founded
in facts
VII Of the necessary consequences of the Hartleian Theory--Of
the original mistake or equivocation which procured its
admission--Memoria technica
VIII The system of Dualism introduced by Des Cartes--Refined
first by Spinoza and afterwards by Leibnitz into the
doctrine of Harmonia praestabilita--Hylozoism--Materialism
--None of these systems, or any possible theory of
Association, supplies or supersedes a theory of
Perception, or explains the formation of the Associable
XI Is Philosophy possible as a science, and what are its
conditions? --Giordano Bruno--Literary Aristocracy, or the
existence of a tacit compact among the learned as a
privileged order--The Author's obligations to the Mystics-
To Immanuel Kant--The difference between the letter and
The spirit of Kant's writings, and a vindication of
Prudence in the teaching of Philosophy--Fichte's attempt
to complete the Critical system-Its partial success and
ultimate failure--Obligations to Schelling; and among
English writers to Saumarez
X A Chapter of digression and anecdotes, as an interlude
preceding that on the nature and genesis of the Imagination
or Plastic Power--On Pedantry and pedantic expressions--
Advice to young authors respecting publication--Various
anecdotes of the Author's literary life, and the progress
of his opinions in Religion and Politics
XI An affectionate exhortation to those who in early life feel
themselves disposed to become authors
XII A Chapter of requests and premonitions concerning the perusal
or omission of the chapter that follows
XIII On the Imagination, or Esemplastic power
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
XV The specific symptoms of poetic power elucidated in a
Critical analysis of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, and
Rape of Lucrece
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
XVII Examination of the tenets peculiar to Mr. Wordsworth--
Rustic life (above all, low and rustic life) especially
unfavourable to the formation of a human diction-The
best parts of language the product of philosophers, not of
clowns or shepherds--Poetry essentially ideal and generic--
The language of Milton as much the language of real life,
yea, incomparably more so than that of the cottager
XVIII Language of metrical composition, why and wherein essentially
different from that of prose--Origin and elements of metre
--Its necessary consequences, and the conditions thereby
imposed on the metrical writer in the choice of his diction
XIX Continuation--Concerning the real object, which, it is
probable, Mr. Wordsworth had before him in his critical
preface--Elucidation and application of this
XX The former subject continued--The neutral style, or that
common to Prose and Poetry, exemplified by specimens from
Chaucer, Herbert, and others
XXI Remarks on the present mode of conducting critical journals
XXII The characteristic defects of Wordsworth's poetry, with the
principles from which the judgment, that they are defects,
is deduced--Their proportion to the beauties--For the
greatest part characteristic of his theory only
SATYRANE'S LETTERS
XXIII Critique on Bertram
XXIV Conclusion
So wenig er auch bestimmt seyn mag, andere zu belehren, so wuenscht
er doch sich denen mitzutheilen, die er sich gleichgesinnt weis, (oder
hofft,) deren Anzahl aber in der Breite der Welt zerstreut ist; er
wuenscht sein Verhaeltniss zu den aeltesten Freunden dadurch wieder
anzuknuepfen, mit neuen es fortzusetzen, und in der letzten Generation
sich wieder andere fur seine uebrige Lebenszeit zu gewinnen. Er wuenscht
der Jugend die Umwege zu ersparen, auf denen er sich selbst verirrte.
(Goethe. Einleitung in die Propylaeen. )
TRANSLATION. Little call as he may have to instruct others, he wishes
nevertheless to open out his heart to such as he either knows or hopes
to be of like mind with himself, but who are widely scattered in the
world: he wishes to knit anew his connections with his oldest friends,
to continue those recently formed, and to win other friends among the
rising generation for the remaining course of his life. He wishes to
spare the young those circuitous paths, on which he himself had lost his
way.
BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA
CHAPTER I
Motives to the present work--Reception of the Author's first
publication--Discipline of his taste at school--Effect of contemporary
writers on youthful minds--Bowles's Sonnets--Comparison between the
poets before and since Pope.
It has been my lot to have had my name introduced both in conversation,
and in print, more frequently than I find it easy to explain, whether
I consider the fewness, unimportance, and limited circulation of my
writings, or the retirement and distance, in which I have lived, both
from the literary and political world. Most often it has been connected
with some charge which I could not acknowledge, or some principle which
I had never entertained. Nevertheless, had I had no other motive
or incitement, the reader would not have been troubled with this
exculpation. What my additional purposes were, will be seen in the
following pages. It will be found, that the least of what I have written
concerns myself personally. I have used the narration chiefly for the
purpose of giving a continuity to the work, in part for the sake of
the miscellaneous reflections suggested to me by particular events, but
still more as introductory to a statement of my principles in Politics,
Religion, and Philosophy, and an application of the rules, deduced from
philosophical principles, to poetry and criticism. But of the objects,
which I proposed to myself, it was not the least important to effect,
as far as possible, a settlement of the long continued controversy
concerning the true nature of poetic diction; and at the same time to
define with the utmost impartiality the real poetic character of the
poet, by whose writings this controversy was first kindled, and has been
since fuelled and fanned.
In the spring of 1796, when I had but little passed the verge of
manhood, I published a small volume of juvenile poems. They were
received with a degree of favour, which, young as I was, I well know
was bestowed on them not so much for any positive merit, as because they
were considered buds of hope, and promises of better works to come. The
critics of that day, the most flattering, equally with the severest,
concurred in objecting to them obscurity, a general turgidness of
diction, and a profusion of new coined double epithets [1]. The first
is the fault which a writer is the least able to detect in his own
compositions: and my mind was not then sufficiently disciplined to
receive the authority of others, as a substitute for my own conviction.
Satisfied that the thoughts, such as they were, could not have been
expressed otherwise, or at least more perspicuously, I forgot to
inquire, whether the thoughts themselves did not demand a degree of
attention unsuitable to the nature and objects of poetry. This remark
however applies chiefly, though not exclusively, to the Religious
Musings. The remainder of the charge I admitted to its full extent,
and not without sincere acknowledgments both to my private and public
censors for their friendly admonitions. In the after editions, I pruned
the double epithets with no sparing hand, and used my best efforts to
tame the swell and glitter both of thought and diction; though in truth,
these parasite plants of youthful poetry had insinuated themselves into
my longer poems with such intricacy of union, that I was often obliged
to omit disentangling the weed, from the fear of snapping the flower.
From that period to the date of the present work I have published
nothing, with my name, which could by any possibility have come before
the board of anonymous criticism. Even the three or four poems, printed
with the works of a friend [2], as far as they were censured at all,
were charged with the same or similar defects, (though I am persuaded
not with equal justice),--with an excess of ornament, in addition to
strained and elaborate diction. I must be permitted to add, that,
even at the early period of my juvenile poems, I saw and admitted the
superiority of an austerer and more natural style, with an insight not
less clear, than I at present possess. My judgment was stronger than
were my powers of realizing its dictates; and the faults of my language,
though indeed partly owing to a wrong choice of subjects, and the desire
of giving a poetic colouring to abstract and metaphysical truths,
in which a new world then seemed to open upon me, did yet, in part
likewise, originate in unfeigned diffidence of my own comparative
talent. --During several years of my youth and early manhood, I
reverenced those who had re-introduced the manly simplicity of the
Greek, and of our own elder poets, with such enthusiasm as made the hope
seem presumptuous of writing successfully in the same style. Perhaps
a similar process has happened to others; but my earliest poems were
marked by an ease and simplicity, which I have studied, perhaps with
inferior success, to impress on my later compositions.
At school, (Christ's Hospital,) I enjoyed the inestimable advantage of
a very sensible, though at the same time, a very severe master, the
Reverend James Bowyer. He early moulded my taste to the preference of
Demosthenes to Cicero, of Homer and Theocritus to Virgil, and again of
Virgil to Ovid. He habituated me to compare Lucretius, (in such extracts
as I then read,) Terence, and above all the chaster poems of Catullus,
not only with the Roman poets of the, so called, silver and brazen ages;
but with even those of the Augustan aera: and on grounds of plain sense
and universal logic to see and assert the superiority of the former in
the truth and nativeness both of their thoughts and diction. At the
same time that we were studying the Greek tragic poets, he made us read
Shakespeare and Milton as lessons: and they were the lessons too, which
required most time and trouble to bring up, so as to escape his
censure. I learned from him, that poetry, even that of the loftiest and,
seemingly, that of the wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as severe
as that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more
complex, and dependent on more, and more fugitive causes. In the truly
great poets, he would say, there is a reason assignable, not only for
every word, but for the position of every word; and I well remember
that, availing himself of the synonymes to the Homer of Didymus, he made
us attempt to show, with regard to each, why it would not have answered
the same purpose; and wherein consisted the peculiar fitness of the word
in the original text.
In our own English compositions, (at least for the last three years of
our school education,) he showed no mercy to phrase, metaphor, or image,
unsupported by a sound sense, or where the same sense might have been
conveyed with equal force and dignity in plainer words [3]. Lute,
harp, and lyre, Muse, Muses, and inspirations, Pegasus, Parnassus, and
Hippocrene were all an abomination to him. In fancy I can almost hear
him now, exclaiming "Harp? Harp? Lyre? Pen and ink, boy, you mean! Muse,
boy, Muse? Your nurse's daughter, you mean! Pierian spring? Oh aye!
the cloister-pump, I suppose! " Nay certain introductions, similes,
and examples, were placed by name on a list of interdiction. Among the
similes, there was, I remember, that of the manchineel fruit, as suiting
equally well with too many subjects; in which however it yielded the
palm at once to the example of Alexander and Clytus, which
was equally good and apt, whatever might be the theme. Was
it ambition? Alexander and Clytus! --Flattery? Alexander and
Clytus! --anger--drunkenness--pride--friendship--ingratitude--late
repentance? Still, still Alexander and Clytus! At length, the praises of
agriculture having been exemplified in the sagacious observation that,
had Alexander been holding the plough, he would not have run his friend
Clytus through with a spear, this tried, and serviceable old friend
was banished by public edict in saecula saeculorum. I have sometimes
ventured to think, that a list of this kind, or an index expurgatorius
of certain well-known and ever-returning phrases, both introductory,
and transitional, including a large assortment of modest egoisms, and
flattering illeisms, and the like, might be hung up in our Law-courts,
and both Houses of Parliament, with great advantage to the public, as
an important saving of national time, an incalculable relief to his
Majesty's ministers, but above all, as insuring the thanks of country
attornies, and their clients, who have private bills to carry through
the House.
Be this as it may, there was one custom of our master's, which I
cannot pass over in silence, because I think it imitable and worthy of
imitation. He would often permit our exercises, under some pretext of
want of time, to accumulate, till each lad had four or five to be looked
over. Then placing the whole number abreast on his desk, he would
ask the writer, why this or that sentence might not have found
as appropriate a place under this or that other thesis: and if no
satisfying answer could be returned, and two faults of the same kind
were found in one exercise, the irrevocable verdict followed, the
exercise was torn up, and another on the same subject to be produced, in
addition to the tasks of the day. The reader will, I trust, excuse this
tribute of recollection to a man, whose severities, even now, not seldom
furnish the dreams, by which the blind fancy would fain interpret to the
mind the painful sensations of distempered sleep; but neither lessen nor
dim the deep sense of my moral and intellectual obligations. He sent
us to the University excellent Latin and Greek scholars, and tolerable
Hebraists. Yet our classical knowledge was the least of the good gifts,
which we derived from his zealous and conscientious tutorage. He is now
gone to his final reward, full of years, and full of honours, even of
those honours, which were dearest to his heart, as gratefully bestowed
by that school, and still binding him to the interests of that school,
in which he had been himself educated, and to which during his whole
life he was a dedicated thing.
From causes, which this is not the place to investigate, no models
of past times, however perfect, can have the same vivid effect on
the youthful mind, as the productions of contemporary genius. The
discipline, my mind had undergone, Ne falleretur rotundo sono et versuum
cursu, cincinnis, et floribus; sed ut inspiceret quidnam subesset, quae,
sedes, quod firmamentum, quis fundus verbis; an figures essent mera
ornatura et orationis fucus; vel sanguinis e materiae ipsius corde
effluentis rubor quidam nativus et incalescentia genuina;--removed all
obstacles to the appreciation of excellence in style without diminishing
my delight. That I was thus prepared for the perusal of Mr. Bowles's
sonnets and earlier poems, at once increased their influence, and my
enthusiasm. The great works of past ages seem to a young man things of
another race, in respect to which his faculties must remain passive
and submiss, even as to the stars and mountains. But the writings of a
contemporary, perhaps not many years older than himself, surrounded by
the same circumstances, and disciplined by the same manners, possess a
reality for him, and inspire an actual friendship as of a man for a man.
His very admiration is the wind which fans and feeds his hope. The
poems themselves assume the properties of flesh and blood. To recite, to
extol, to contend for them is but the payment of a debt due to one, who
exists to receive it.
There are indeed modes of teaching which have produced, and are
producing, youths of a very different stamp; modes of teaching, in
comparison with which we have been called on to despise our great public
schools, and universities,
in whose halls are hung
Armoury of the invincible knights of old--
modes, by which children are to be metamorphosed into prodigies. And
prodigies with a vengeance have I known thus produced; prodigies of
self-conceit, shallowness, arrogance, and infidelity! Instead of
storing the memory, during the period when the memory is the predominant
faculty, with facts for the after exercise of the judgment; and instead
of awakening by the noblest models the fond and unmixed love and
admiration, which is the natural and graceful temper of early youth;
these nurslings of improved pedagogy are taught to dispute and decide;
to suspect all but their own and their lecturer's wisdom; and to
hold nothing sacred from their contempt, but their own contemptible
arrogance; boy-graduates in all the technicals, and in all the dirty
passions and impudence of anonymous criticism. To such dispositions
alone can the admonition of Pliny be requisite, Neque enim debet
operibus ejus obesse, quod vivit. An si inter eos, quos nunquam vidimus,
floruisset, non solum libros ejus, verum etiam imagines conquireremus,
ejusdem nunc honor prasentis, et gratia quasi satietate languescet?
At hoc pravum, malignumque est, non admirari hominem admiratione
dignissimum, quia videre, complecti, nec laudare tantum, verum etiam
amare contingit.
I had just entered on my seventeenth year, when the sonnets of Mr.
Bowles, twenty in number, and just then published in a quarto pamphlet,
were first made known and presented to me, by a schoolfellow who had
quitted us for the University, and who, during the whole time that he
was in our first form (or in our school language a Grecian,) had been my
patron and protector. I refer to Dr. Middleton, the truly learned, and
every way excellent Bishop of Calcutta:
qui laudibus amplis
Ingenium celebrare meum, calamumque solebat,
Calcar agens animo validum. Non omnia terra
Obruta; vivit amor, vivit dolor; ora negatur
Dulcia conspicere; at fiere et meminisse relictum est.
It was a double pleasure to me, and still remains a tender recollection,
that I should have received from a friend so revered the first knowledge
of a poet, by whose works, year after year, I was so enthusiastically
delighted and inspired. My earliest acquaintances will not have
forgotten the undisciplined eagerness and impetuous zeal, with which I
laboured to make proselytes, not only of my companions, but of all with
whom I conversed, of whatever rank, and in whatever place. As my school
finances did not permit me to purchase copies, I made, within less than
a year and a half, more than forty transcriptions, as the best presents
I could offer to those, who had in any way won my regard. And with
almost equal delight did I receive the three or four following
publications of the same author.
Though I have seen and known enough of mankind to be well aware, that
I shall perhaps stand alone in my creed, and that it will be well, if
I subject myself to no worse charge than that of singularity; I am not
therefore deterred from avowing, that I regard, and ever have regarded
the obligations of intellect among the most sacred of the claims of
gratitude. A valuable thought, or a particular train of thoughts, gives
me additional pleasure, when I can safely refer and attribute it to the
conversation or correspondence of another. My obligations to Mr. Bowles
were indeed important, and for radical good. At a very premature age,
even before my fifteenth year, I had bewildered myself in metaphysics,
and in theological controversy. Nothing else pleased me. History, and
particular facts, lost all interest in my mind. Poetry--(though for a
school-boy of that age, I was above par in English versification, and
had already produced two or three compositions which, I may venture to
say, without reference to my age, were somewhat above mediocrity, and
which had gained me more credit than the sound, good sense of my old
master was at all pleased with,)--poetry itself, yea, novels and
romances, became insipid to me. In my friendless wanderings on our
leave-days [4], (for I was an orphan, and had scarcely any connections
in London,) highly was I delighted, if any passenger, especially if he
were dressed in black, would enter into conversation with me. For I soon
found the means of directing it to my favourite subjects
Of providence, fore-knowledge, will, and fate,
Fixed fate, free will, fore-knowledge absolute,
And found no end in wandering mazes lost.
This preposterous pursuit was, beyond doubt, injurious both to my
natural powers, and to the progress of my education. It would perhaps
have been destructive, had it been continued; but from this I was
auspiciously withdrawn, partly indeed by an accidental introduction to
an amiable family, chiefly however, by the genial influence of a style
of poetry, so tender and yet so manly, so natural and real, and yet so
dignified and harmonious, as the sonnets and other early poems of Mr.
Bowles. Well would it have been for me, perhaps, had I never relapsed
into the same mental disease; if I had continued to pluck the flower and
reap the harvest from the cultivated surface, instead of delving in the
unwholesome quicksilver mines of metaphysic lore. And if in after time
I have sought a refuge from bodily pain and mismanaged sensibility in
abstruse researches, which exercised the strength and subtilty of the
understanding without awakening the feelings of the heart; still there
was a long and blessed interval, during which my natural faculties were
allowed to expand, and my original tendencies to develop themselves;--my
fancy, and the love of nature, and the sense of beauty in forms and
sounds.
The second advantage, which I owe to my early perusal, and admiration
of these poems, (to which let me add,) though known to me at a somewhat
later period, the Lewesdon Hill of Mr. Crowe bears more immediately on
my present subject. Among those with whom I conversed, there were,
of course, very many who had formed their taste, and their notions of
poetry, from the writings of Pope and his followers; or to speak more
generally, in that school of French poetry, condensed and invigorated by
English understanding, which had predominated from the last century. I
was not blind to the merits of this school, yet, as from inexperience of
the world, and consequent want of sympathy with the general subjects of
these poems, they gave me little pleasure, I doubtless undervalued the
kind, and with the presumption of youth withheld from its masters
the legitimate name of poets. I saw that the excellence of this kind
consisted in just and acute observations on men and manners in an
artificial state of society, as its matter and substance; and in the
logic of wit, conveyed in smooth and strong epigrammatic couplets, as
its form: that even when the subject was addressed to the fancy, or the
intellect, as in the Rape of the Lock, or the Essay on Man; nay, when it
was a consecutive narration, as in that astonishing product of matchless
talent and ingenuity Pope's Translation of the Iliad; still a point
was looked for at the end of each second line, and the whole was, as
it were, a sorites, or, if I may exchange a logical for a grammatical
metaphor, a conjunction disjunctive, of epigrams. Meantime the matter
and diction seemed to me characterized not so much by poetic thoughts,
as by thoughts translated into the language of poetry. On this last
point, I had occasion to render my own thoughts gradually more and
more plain to myself, by frequent amicable disputes concerning Darwin's
Botanic Garden, which, for some years, was greatly extolled, not only
by the reading public in general, but even by those, whose genius and
natural robustness of understanding enabled them afterwards to act
foremost in dissipating these "painted mists" that occasionally rise
from the marshes at the foot of Parnassus. During my first Cambridge
vacation, I assisted a friend in a contribution for a literary society
in Devonshire: and in this I remember to have compared Darwin's work to
the Russian palace of ice, glittering, cold and transitory. In the same
essay too, I assigned sundry reasons, chiefly drawn from a comparison
of passages in the Latin poets with the original Greek, from which they
were borrowed, for the preference of Collins's odes to those of Gray;
and of the simile in Shakespeare
How like a younker or a prodigal
The scarfed bark puts from her native bay,
Hugg'd and embraced by the strumpet wind!
How like the prodigal doth she return,
With over-weather'd ribs and ragged sails,
Lean, rent, and beggar'd by the strumpet wind!
(Merch. of Ven. Act II. sc. 6. )
to the imitation in the Bard;
Fair laughs the morn, and soft the zephyr blows
While proudly riding o'er the azure realm
In gallant trim the gilded vessel goes,
Youth at the prow and pleasure at the helm;
Regardless of the sweeping whirlwind's sway,
That hush'd in grim repose, expects it's evening prey.
(in which, by the bye, the words "realm" and "sway" are rhymes dearly
purchased)--I preferred the original on the ground, that in the
imitation it depended wholly on the compositor's putting, or not
putting, a small capital, both in this, and in many other passages of
the same poet, whether the words should be personifications, or mere
abstractions. I mention this, because, in referring various lines in
Gray to their original in Shakespeare and Milton, and in the clear
perception how completely all the propriety was lost in the transfer,
I was, at that early period, led to a conjecture, which, many years
afterwards was recalled to me from the same thought having been started
in conversation, but far more ably, and developed more fully, by
Mr. Wordsworth;--namely, that this style of poetry, which I have
characterized above, as translations of prose thoughts into poetic
language, had been kept up by, if it did not wholly arise from, the
custom of writing Latin verses, and the great importance attached to
these exercises, in our public schools. Whatever might have been the
case in the fifteenth century, when the use of the Latin tongue was so
general among learned men, that Erasmus is said to have forgotten his
native language; yet in the present day it is not to be supposed, that a
youth can think in Latin, or that he can have any other reliance on the
force or fitness of his phrases, but the authority of the writer
from whom he has adopted them. Consequently he must first prepare his
thoughts, and then pick out, from Virgil, Horace, Ovid, or perhaps more
compendiously from his Gradus, halves and quarters of lines, in which to
embody them.
I never object to a certain degree of disputatiousness in a young man
from the age of seventeen to that of four or five and twenty, provided I
find him always arguing on one side of the question. The controversies,
occasioned by my unfeigned zeal for the honour of a favourite
contemporary, then known to me only by his works, were of great
advantage in the formation and establishment of my taste and critical
opinions. In my defence of the lines running into each other, instead of
closing at each couplet; and of natural language, neither bookish, nor
vulgar, neither redolent of the lamp, nor of the kennel, such as I will
remember thee; instead of the same thought tricked up in the rag-fair
finery of,
------thy image on her wing
Before my fancy's eye shall memory bring,--
I had continually to adduce the metre and diction of the Greek poets,
from Homer to Theocritus inclusively; and still more of our elder
English poets, from Chaucer to Milton. Nor was this all. But as it was
my constant reply to authorities brought against me from later poets
of great name, that no authority could avail in opposition to Truth,
Nature, Logic, and the Laws of Universal Grammar; actuated too by my
former passion for metaphysical investigations; I laboured at a solid
foundation, on which permanently to ground my opinions, in the component
faculties of the human mind itself, and their comparative dignity and
importance. According to the faculty or source, from which the pleasure
given by any poem or passage was derived, I estimated the merit of
such poem or passage. As the result of all my reading and meditation,
I abstracted two critical aphorisms, deeming them to comprise the
conditions and criteria of poetic style;--first, that not the poem which
we have read, but that to which we return, with the greatest pleasure,
possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of essential
poetry;--secondly, that whatever lines can be translated into other
words of the same language, without diminution of their significance,
either in sense or association, or in any worthy feeling, are so far
vicious in their diction. Be it however observed, that I excluded from
the list of worthy feelings, the pleasure derived from mere novelty in
the reader, and the desire of exciting wonderment at his powers in the
author. Oftentimes since then, in pursuing French tragedies, I
have fancied two marks of admiration at the end of each line, as
hieroglyphics of the author's own admiration at his own cleverness.
Our genuine admiration of a great poet is a continuous undercurrent of
feeling! it is everywhere present, but seldom anywhere as a separate
excitement. I was wont boldly to affirm, that it would be scarcely more
difficult to push a stone out from the Pyramids with the bare hand, than
to alter a word, or the position of a word, in Milton or Shakespeare,
(in their most important works at least,) without making the poet
say something else, or something worse, than he does say. One great
distinction, I appeared to myself to see plainly between even the
characteristic faults of our elder poets, and the false beauty of the
moderns. In the former, from Donne to Cowley, we find the most fantastic
out-of-the-way thoughts, but in the most pure and genuine mother
English, in the latter the most obvious thoughts, in language the most
fantastic and arbitrary. Our faulty elder poets sacrificed the passion
and passionate flow of poetry to the subtleties of intellect and to the
stars of wit; the moderns to the glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet
broken and heterogeneous imagery, or rather to an amphibious something,
made up, half of image, and half of abstract [5] meaning. The one
sacrificed the heart to the head; the other both heart and head to point
and drapery.
The reader must make himself acquainted with the general style of
composition that was at that time deemed poetry, in order to understand
and account for the effect produced on me by the Sonnets, the Monody
at Matlock, and the Hope, of Mr. Bowles; for it is peculiar to original
genius to become less and less striking, in proportion to its success
in improving the taste and judgment of its contemporaries. The poems of
West, indeed, had the merit of chaste and manly diction; but they were
cold, and, if I may so express it, only dead-coloured; while in the
best of Warton's there is a stiffness, which too often gives them the
appearance of imitations from the Greek. Whatever relation, therefore,
of cause or impulse Percy's collection of Ballads may bear to the most
popular poems of the present day; yet in a more sustained and elevated
style, of the then living poets, Cowper and Bowles [6] were, to the best
of my knowledge, the first who combined natural thoughts with natural
diction; the first who reconciled the heart with the head.
It is true, as I have before mentioned, that from diffidence in my own
powers, I for a short time adopted a laborious and florid diction, which
I myself deemed, if not absolutely vicious, yet of very inferior worth.
Gradually, however, my practice conformed to my better judgment; and the
compositions of my twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth years--(for example,
the shorter blank verse poems, the lines, which now form the middle and
conclusion of the poem entitled the Destiny of Nations, and the tragedy
of Remorse)--are not more below my present ideal in respect of the
general tissue of the style than those of the latest date. Their faults
were at least a remnant of the former leaven, and among the many who
have done me the honour of putting my poems in the same class with those
of my betters, the one or two, who have pretended to bring examples of
affected simplicity from my volume, have been able to adduce but
one instance, and that out of a copy of verses half ludicrous, half
splenetic, which I intended, and had myself characterized, as sermoni
propiora.
Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an
excess, which will itself need reforming. The reader will excuse me for
noticing, that I myself was the first to expose risu honesto the three
sins of poetry, one or the other of which is the most likely to beset a
young writer. So long ago as the publication of the second number of the
Monthly Magazine, under the name of Nehemiah Higginbottom, I contributed
three sonnets, the first of which had for its object to excite a
good-natured laugh at the spirit of doleful egotism, and at the
recurrence of favourite phrases, with the double defect of being at
once trite and licentious;--the second was on low creeping language and
thoughts, under the pretence of simplicity; the third, the phrases of
which were borrowed entirely from my own poems, on the indiscriminate
use of elaborate and swelling language and imagery. The reader will find
them in the note [7] below, and will I trust regard them as reprinted
for biographical purposes alone, and not for their poetic merits. So
general at that time, and so decided was the opinion concerning the
characteristic vices of my style, that a celebrated physician (now,
alas! no more) speaking of me in other respects with his usual kindness,
to a gentleman, who was about to meet me at a dinner party, could not
however resist giving him a hint not to mention 'The house that Jack
built' in my presence, for "that I was as sore as a boil about that
sonnet;" he not knowing that I was myself the author of it.
CHAPTER II
Supposed irritability of men of genius brought to the test of
facts--Causes and occasions of the charge--Its injustice.
I have often thought, that it would be neither uninstructive nor
unamusing to analyze, and bring forward into distinct consciousness,
that complex feeling, with which readers in general take part against
the author, in favour of the critic; and the readiness with which they
apply to all poets the old sarcasm of Horace upon the scribblers of his
time
------genus irritabile vatum.
A debility and dimness of the imaginative power, and a consequent
necessity of reliance on the immediate impressions of the senses, do, we
know well, render the mind liable to superstition and fanaticism. Having
a deficient portion of internal and proper warmth, minds of this class
seek in the crowd circum fana for a warmth in common, which they do not
possess singly. Cold and phlegmatic in their own nature, like damp
hay, they heat and inflame by co-acervation; or like bees they become
restless and irritable through the increased temperature of collected
multitudes. Hence the German word for fanaticism, (such at least was
its original import,) is derived from the swarming of bees, namely,
schwaermen, schwaermerey. The passion being in an inverse proportion to
the insight,--that the more vivid, as this the less distinct--anger is
the inevitable consequence. The absense of all foundation within their
own minds for that, which they yet believe both true and indispensable
to their safety and happiness, cannot but produce an uneasy state of
feeling, an involuntary sense of fear from which nature has no means
of rescuing herself but by anger. Experience informs us that the first
defence of weak minds is to recriminate.
There's no philosopher but sees,
That rage and fear are one disease;
Tho' that may burn, and this may freeze,
They're both alike the ague.
But where the ideas are vivid, and there exists an endless power of
combining and modifying them, the feelings and affections blend more
easily and intimately with these ideal creations than with the objects
of the senses; the mind is affected by thoughts, rather than by things;
and only then feels the requisite interest even for the most important
events and accidents, when by means of meditation they have passed into
thoughts. The sanity of the mind is between superstition with fanaticism
on the one hand, and enthusiasm with indifference and a diseased
slowness to action on the other. For the conceptions of the mind may be
so vivid and adequate, as to preclude that impulse to the realizing of
them, which is strongest and most restless in those, who possess more
than mere talent, (or the faculty of appropriating and applying the
knowledge of others,)--yet still want something of the creative and
self-sufficing power of absolute genius. For this reason therefore,
they are men of commanding genius. While the former rest content between
thought and reality, as it were in an intermundium of which their
own living spirit supplies the substance, and their imagination the
ever-varying form; the latter must impress their preconceptions on the
world without, in order to present them back to their own view with the
satisfying degree of clearness, distinctness, and individuality. These
in tranquil times are formed to exhibit a perfect poem in palace, or
temple, or landscape-garden; or a tale of romance in canals that join
sea with sea, or in walls of rock, which, shouldering back the billows,
imitate the power, and supply the benevolence of nature to sheltered
navies; or in aqueducts that, arching the wide vale from mountain to
mountain, give a Palmyra to the desert. But alas! in times of tumult
they are the men destined to come forth as the shaping spirit of ruin,
to destroy the wisdom of ages in order to substitute the fancies of a
day, and to change kings and kingdoms, as the wind shifts and shapes the
clouds [8]. The records of biography seem to confirm this theory. The
men of the greatest genius, as far as we can judge from their own works
or from the accounts of their contemporaries, appear to have been of
calm and tranquil temper in all that related to themselves. In the
inward assurance of permanent fame, they seem to have been either
indifferent or resigned with regard to immediate reputation. Through all
the works of Chaucer there reigns a cheerfulness, a manly hilarity which
makes it almost impossible to doubt a correspondent habit of feeling in
the author himself. Shakespeare's evenness and sweetness of temper were
almost proverbial in his own age. That this did not arise from ignorance
of his own comparative greatness, we have abundant proof in his Sonnets,
which could scarcely have been known to Pope [9], when he asserted, that
our great bard--
------grew immortal in his own despite.
(Epist. to Augustus. )
Speaking of one whom he had celebrated, and contrasting the duration of
his works with that of his personal existence, Shakespeare adds:
Your name from hence immortal life shall have,
Tho' I once gone to all the world must die;
The earth can yield me but a common grave,
When you entombed in men's eyes shall lie.
Your monument shall be my gentle verse,
Which eyes not yet created shall o'er-read;
And tongues to be your being shall rehearse,
When all the breathers of this world are dead:
You still shall live, such virtue hath my pen,
Where breath most breathes, e'en in the mouth of men.
SONNET LXXXI.
I have taken the first that occurred; but Shakespeare's readiness to
praise his rivals, ore pleno, and the confidence of his own equality
with those whom he deemed most worthy of his praise, are alike
manifested in another Sonnet.
Was it the proud full sail of his great verse,
Bound for the praise of all-too-precious you,
That did my ripe thoughts in my brain inhearse,
Making their tomb, the womb wherein they grew?
Was it his spirit, by spirits taught to write
Above a mortal pitch that struck me dead?
No, neither he, nor his compeers by night
Giving him aid, my verse astonished.
He, nor that affable familiar ghost,
Which nightly gulls him with intelligence,
As victors of my silence cannot boast;
I was not sick of any fear from thence!
But when your countenance fill'd up his line,
Then lack'd I matter, that enfeebled mine.
S. LXXXVI.
In Spenser, indeed, we trace a mind constitutionally tender, delicate,
and, in comparison with his three great compeers, I had almost said,
effeminate; and this additionally saddened by the unjust persecution of
Burleigh, and the severe calamities, which overwhelmed his latter days.
It would perhaps
have been destructive, had it been continued; but from this I was
auspiciously withdrawn, partly indeed by an accidental introduction to
an amiable family, chiefly however, by the genial influence of a style
of poetry, so tender and yet so manly, so natural and real, and yet so
dignified and harmonious, as the sonnets and other early poems of Mr.
Bowles. Well would it have been for me, perhaps, had I never relapsed
into the same mental disease; if I had continued to pluck the flower and
reap the harvest from the cultivated surface, instead of delving in the
unwholesome quicksilver mines of metaphysic lore. And if in after time
I have sought a refuge from bodily pain and mismanaged sensibility in
abstruse researches, which exercised the strength and subtilty of the
understanding without awakening the feelings of the heart; still there
was a long and blessed interval, during which my natural faculties were
allowed to expand, and my original tendencies to develop themselves;--my
fancy, and the love of nature, and the sense of beauty in forms and
sounds.
The second advantage, which I owe to my early perusal, and admiration
of these poems, (to which let me add,) though known to me at a somewhat
later period, the Lewesdon Hill of Mr. Crowe bears more immediately on
my present subject. Among those with whom I conversed, there were,
of course, very many who had formed their taste, and their notions of
poetry, from the writings of Pope and his followers; or to speak more
generally, in that school of French poetry, condensed and invigorated by
English understanding, which had predominated from the last century. I
was not blind to the merits of this school, yet, as from inexperience of
the world, and consequent want of sympathy with the general subjects of
these poems, they gave me little pleasure, I doubtless undervalued the
kind, and with the presumption of youth withheld from its masters
the legitimate name of poets. I saw that the excellence of this kind
consisted in just and acute observations on men and manners in an
artificial state of society, as its matter and substance; and in the
logic of wit, conveyed in smooth and strong epigrammatic couplets, as
its form: that even when the subject was addressed to the fancy, or the
intellect, as in the Rape of the Lock, or the Essay on Man; nay, when it
was a consecutive narration, as in that astonishing product of matchless
talent and ingenuity Pope's Translation of the Iliad; still a point
was looked for at the end of each second line, and the whole was, as
it were, a sorites, or, if I may exchange a logical for a grammatical
metaphor, a conjunction disjunctive, of epigrams. Meantime the matter
and diction seemed to me characterized not so much by poetic thoughts,
as by thoughts translated into the language of poetry. On this last
point, I had occasion to render my own thoughts gradually more and
more plain to myself, by frequent amicable disputes concerning Darwin's
Botanic Garden, which, for some years, was greatly extolled, not only
by the reading public in general, but even by those, whose genius and
natural robustness of understanding enabled them afterwards to act
foremost in dissipating these "painted mists" that occasionally rise
from the marshes at the foot of Parnassus. During my first Cambridge
vacation, I assisted a friend in a contribution for a literary society
in Devonshire: and in this I remember to have compared Darwin's work to
the Russian palace of ice, glittering, cold and transitory. In the same
essay too, I assigned sundry reasons, chiefly drawn from a comparison
of passages in the Latin poets with the original Greek, from which they
were borrowed, for the preference of Collins's odes to those of Gray;
and of the simile in Shakespeare
How like a younker or a prodigal
The scarfed bark puts from her native bay,
Hugg'd and embraced by the strumpet wind!
How like the prodigal doth she return,
With over-weather'd ribs and ragged sails,
Lean, rent, and beggar'd by the strumpet wind!
(Merch. of Ven. Act II. sc. 6. )
to the imitation in the Bard;
Fair laughs the morn, and soft the zephyr blows
While proudly riding o'er the azure realm
In gallant trim the gilded vessel goes,
Youth at the prow and pleasure at the helm;
Regardless of the sweeping whirlwind's sway,
That hush'd in grim repose, expects it's evening prey.
(in which, by the bye, the words "realm" and "sway" are rhymes dearly
purchased)--I preferred the original on the ground, that in the
imitation it depended wholly on the compositor's putting, or not
putting, a small capital, both in this, and in many other passages of
the same poet, whether the words should be personifications, or mere
abstractions. I mention this, because, in referring various lines in
Gray to their original in Shakespeare and Milton, and in the clear
perception how completely all the propriety was lost in the transfer,
I was, at that early period, led to a conjecture, which, many years
afterwards was recalled to me from the same thought having been started
in conversation, but far more ably, and developed more fully, by
Mr. Wordsworth;--namely, that this style of poetry, which I have
characterized above, as translations of prose thoughts into poetic
language, had been kept up by, if it did not wholly arise from, the
custom of writing Latin verses, and the great importance attached to
these exercises, in our public schools. Whatever might have been the
case in the fifteenth century, when the use of the Latin tongue was so
general among learned men, that Erasmus is said to have forgotten his
native language; yet in the present day it is not to be supposed, that a
youth can think in Latin, or that he can have any other reliance on the
force or fitness of his phrases, but the authority of the writer
from whom he has adopted them. Consequently he must first prepare his
thoughts, and then pick out, from Virgil, Horace, Ovid, or perhaps more
compendiously from his Gradus, halves and quarters of lines, in which to
embody them.
I never object to a certain degree of disputatiousness in a young man
from the age of seventeen to that of four or five and twenty, provided I
find him always arguing on one side of the question. The controversies,
occasioned by my unfeigned zeal for the honour of a favourite
contemporary, then known to me only by his works, were of great
advantage in the formation and establishment of my taste and critical
opinions. In my defence of the lines running into each other, instead of
closing at each couplet; and of natural language, neither bookish, nor
vulgar, neither redolent of the lamp, nor of the kennel, such as I will
remember thee; instead of the same thought tricked up in the rag-fair
finery of,
------thy image on her wing
Before my fancy's eye shall memory bring,--
I had continually to adduce the metre and diction of the Greek poets,
from Homer to Theocritus inclusively; and still more of our elder
English poets, from Chaucer to Milton. Nor was this all. But as it was
my constant reply to authorities brought against me from later poets
of great name, that no authority could avail in opposition to Truth,
Nature, Logic, and the Laws of Universal Grammar; actuated too by my
former passion for metaphysical investigations; I laboured at a solid
foundation, on which permanently to ground my opinions, in the component
faculties of the human mind itself, and their comparative dignity and
importance. According to the faculty or source, from which the pleasure
given by any poem or passage was derived, I estimated the merit of
such poem or passage. As the result of all my reading and meditation,
I abstracted two critical aphorisms, deeming them to comprise the
conditions and criteria of poetic style;--first, that not the poem which
we have read, but that to which we return, with the greatest pleasure,
possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of essential
poetry;--secondly, that whatever lines can be translated into other
words of the same language, without diminution of their significance,
either in sense or association, or in any worthy feeling, are so far
vicious in their diction. Be it however observed, that I excluded from
the list of worthy feelings, the pleasure derived from mere novelty in
the reader, and the desire of exciting wonderment at his powers in the
author. Oftentimes since then, in pursuing French tragedies, I
have fancied two marks of admiration at the end of each line, as
hieroglyphics of the author's own admiration at his own cleverness.
Our genuine admiration of a great poet is a continuous undercurrent of
feeling! it is everywhere present, but seldom anywhere as a separate
excitement. I was wont boldly to affirm, that it would be scarcely more
difficult to push a stone out from the Pyramids with the bare hand, than
to alter a word, or the position of a word, in Milton or Shakespeare,
(in their most important works at least,) without making the poet
say something else, or something worse, than he does say. One great
distinction, I appeared to myself to see plainly between even the
characteristic faults of our elder poets, and the false beauty of the
moderns. In the former, from Donne to Cowley, we find the most fantastic
out-of-the-way thoughts, but in the most pure and genuine mother
English, in the latter the most obvious thoughts, in language the most
fantastic and arbitrary. Our faulty elder poets sacrificed the passion
and passionate flow of poetry to the subtleties of intellect and to the
stars of wit; the moderns to the glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet
broken and heterogeneous imagery, or rather to an amphibious something,
made up, half of image, and half of abstract [5] meaning. The one
sacrificed the heart to the head; the other both heart and head to point
and drapery.
The reader must make himself acquainted with the general style of
composition that was at that time deemed poetry, in order to understand
and account for the effect produced on me by the Sonnets, the Monody
at Matlock, and the Hope, of Mr. Bowles; for it is peculiar to original
genius to become less and less striking, in proportion to its success
in improving the taste and judgment of its contemporaries. The poems of
West, indeed, had the merit of chaste and manly diction; but they were
cold, and, if I may so express it, only dead-coloured; while in the
best of Warton's there is a stiffness, which too often gives them the
appearance of imitations from the Greek. Whatever relation, therefore,
of cause or impulse Percy's collection of Ballads may bear to the most
popular poems of the present day; yet in a more sustained and elevated
style, of the then living poets, Cowper and Bowles [6] were, to the best
of my knowledge, the first who combined natural thoughts with natural
diction; the first who reconciled the heart with the head.
It is true, as I have before mentioned, that from diffidence in my own
powers, I for a short time adopted a laborious and florid diction, which
I myself deemed, if not absolutely vicious, yet of very inferior worth.
Gradually, however, my practice conformed to my better judgment; and the
compositions of my twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth years--(for example,
the shorter blank verse poems, the lines, which now form the middle and
conclusion of the poem entitled the Destiny of Nations, and the tragedy
of Remorse)--are not more below my present ideal in respect of the
general tissue of the style than those of the latest date. Their faults
were at least a remnant of the former leaven, and among the many who
have done me the honour of putting my poems in the same class with those
of my betters, the one or two, who have pretended to bring examples of
affected simplicity from my volume, have been able to adduce but
one instance, and that out of a copy of verses half ludicrous, half
splenetic, which I intended, and had myself characterized, as sermoni
propiora.
Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an
excess, which will itself need reforming. The reader will excuse me for
noticing, that I myself was the first to expose risu honesto the three
sins of poetry, one or the other of which is the most likely to beset a
young writer. So long ago as the publication of the second number of the
Monthly Magazine, under the name of Nehemiah Higginbottom, I contributed
three sonnets, the first of which had for its object to excite a
good-natured laugh at the spirit of doleful egotism, and at the
recurrence of favourite phrases, with the double defect of being at
once trite and licentious;--the second was on low creeping language and
thoughts, under the pretence of simplicity; the third, the phrases of
which were borrowed entirely from my own poems, on the indiscriminate
use of elaborate and swelling language and imagery. The reader will find
them in the note [7] below, and will I trust regard them as reprinted
for biographical purposes alone, and not for their poetic merits. So
general at that time, and so decided was the opinion concerning the
characteristic vices of my style, that a celebrated physician (now,
alas! no more) speaking of me in other respects with his usual kindness,
to a gentleman, who was about to meet me at a dinner party, could not
however resist giving him a hint not to mention 'The house that Jack
built' in my presence, for "that I was as sore as a boil about that
sonnet;" he not knowing that I was myself the author of it.
CHAPTER II
Supposed irritability of men of genius brought to the test of
facts--Causes and occasions of the charge--Its injustice.
I have often thought, that it would be neither uninstructive nor
unamusing to analyze, and bring forward into distinct consciousness,
that complex feeling, with which readers in general take part against
the author, in favour of the critic; and the readiness with which they
apply to all poets the old sarcasm of Horace upon the scribblers of his
time
------genus irritabile vatum.
A debility and dimness of the imaginative power, and a consequent
necessity of reliance on the immediate impressions of the senses, do, we
know well, render the mind liable to superstition and fanaticism. Having
a deficient portion of internal and proper warmth, minds of this class
seek in the crowd circum fana for a warmth in common, which they do not
possess singly. Cold and phlegmatic in their own nature, like damp
hay, they heat and inflame by co-acervation; or like bees they become
restless and irritable through the increased temperature of collected
multitudes. Hence the German word for fanaticism, (such at least was
its original import,) is derived from the swarming of bees, namely,
schwaermen, schwaermerey. The passion being in an inverse proportion to
the insight,--that the more vivid, as this the less distinct--anger is
the inevitable consequence. The absense of all foundation within their
own minds for that, which they yet believe both true and indispensable
to their safety and happiness, cannot but produce an uneasy state of
feeling, an involuntary sense of fear from which nature has no means
of rescuing herself but by anger. Experience informs us that the first
defence of weak minds is to recriminate.
There's no philosopher but sees,
That rage and fear are one disease;
Tho' that may burn, and this may freeze,
They're both alike the ague.
But where the ideas are vivid, and there exists an endless power of
combining and modifying them, the feelings and affections blend more
easily and intimately with these ideal creations than with the objects
of the senses; the mind is affected by thoughts, rather than by things;
and only then feels the requisite interest even for the most important
events and accidents, when by means of meditation they have passed into
thoughts. The sanity of the mind is between superstition with fanaticism
on the one hand, and enthusiasm with indifference and a diseased
slowness to action on the other. For the conceptions of the mind may be
so vivid and adequate, as to preclude that impulse to the realizing of
them, which is strongest and most restless in those, who possess more
than mere talent, (or the faculty of appropriating and applying the
knowledge of others,)--yet still want something of the creative and
self-sufficing power of absolute genius. For this reason therefore,
they are men of commanding genius. While the former rest content between
thought and reality, as it were in an intermundium of which their
own living spirit supplies the substance, and their imagination the
ever-varying form; the latter must impress their preconceptions on the
world without, in order to present them back to their own view with the
satisfying degree of clearness, distinctness, and individuality. These
in tranquil times are formed to exhibit a perfect poem in palace, or
temple, or landscape-garden; or a tale of romance in canals that join
sea with sea, or in walls of rock, which, shouldering back the billows,
imitate the power, and supply the benevolence of nature to sheltered
navies; or in aqueducts that, arching the wide vale from mountain to
mountain, give a Palmyra to the desert. But alas! in times of tumult
they are the men destined to come forth as the shaping spirit of ruin,
to destroy the wisdom of ages in order to substitute the fancies of a
day, and to change kings and kingdoms, as the wind shifts and shapes the
clouds [8]. The records of biography seem to confirm this theory. The
men of the greatest genius, as far as we can judge from their own works
or from the accounts of their contemporaries, appear to have been of
calm and tranquil temper in all that related to themselves. In the
inward assurance of permanent fame, they seem to have been either
indifferent or resigned with regard to immediate reputation. Through all
the works of Chaucer there reigns a cheerfulness, a manly hilarity which
makes it almost impossible to doubt a correspondent habit of feeling in
the author himself. Shakespeare's evenness and sweetness of temper were
almost proverbial in his own age. That this did not arise from ignorance
of his own comparative greatness, we have abundant proof in his Sonnets,
which could scarcely have been known to Pope [9], when he asserted, that
our great bard--
------grew immortal in his own despite.
(Epist. to Augustus. )
Speaking of one whom he had celebrated, and contrasting the duration of
his works with that of his personal existence, Shakespeare adds:
Your name from hence immortal life shall have,
Tho' I once gone to all the world must die;
The earth can yield me but a common grave,
When you entombed in men's eyes shall lie.
Your monument shall be my gentle verse,
Which eyes not yet created shall o'er-read;
And tongues to be your being shall rehearse,
When all the breathers of this world are dead:
You still shall live, such virtue hath my pen,
Where breath most breathes, e'en in the mouth of men.
SONNET LXXXI.
I have taken the first that occurred; but Shakespeare's readiness to
praise his rivals, ore pleno, and the confidence of his own equality
with those whom he deemed most worthy of his praise, are alike
manifested in another Sonnet.
Was it the proud full sail of his great verse,
Bound for the praise of all-too-precious you,
That did my ripe thoughts in my brain inhearse,
Making their tomb, the womb wherein they grew?
Was it his spirit, by spirits taught to write
Above a mortal pitch that struck me dead?
No, neither he, nor his compeers by night
Giving him aid, my verse astonished.
He, nor that affable familiar ghost,
Which nightly gulls him with intelligence,
As victors of my silence cannot boast;
I was not sick of any fear from thence!
But when your countenance fill'd up his line,
Then lack'd I matter, that enfeebled mine.
S. LXXXVI.
In Spenser, indeed, we trace a mind constitutionally tender, delicate,
and, in comparison with his three great compeers, I had almost said,
effeminate; and this additionally saddened by the unjust persecution of
Burleigh, and the severe calamities, which overwhelmed his latter days.
These causes have diffused over all his compositions "a melancholy
grace," and have drawn forth occasional strains, the more pathetic
from their gentleness. But no where do we find the least trace of
irritability, and still less of quarrelsome or affected contempt of his
censurers.
The same calmness, and even greater self-possession, may be affirmed
of Milton, as far as his poems, and poetic character are concerned.
He reserved his anger for the enemies of religion, freedom, and his
country. My mind is not capable of forming a more august conception,
than arises from the contemplation of this great man in his latter
days;--poor, sick, old, blind, slandered, persecuted,--
Darkness before, and danger's voice behind,--
in an age in which he was as little understood by the party, for whom,
as by that against whom, he had contended; and among men before whom he
strode so far as to dwarf himself by the distance; yet still listening
to the music of his own thoughts, or if additionally cheered,
yet cheered only by the prophetic faith of two or three solitary
individuals, he did nevertheless
------argue not
Against Heaven's hand or will, nor bate a jot
Of heart or hope; but still bore up and steer'd
Right onward.
From others only do we derive our knowledge that Milton, in his latter
day, had his scorners and detractors; and even in his day of youth and
hope, that he had enemies would have been unknown to us, had they not
been likewise the enemies of his country.
I am well aware, that in advanced stages of literature, when there exist
many and excellent models, a high degree of talent, combined with taste
and judgment, and employed in works of imagination, will acquire for
a man the name of a great genius; though even that analogon of genius,
which, in certain states of society, may even render his writings more
popular than the absolute reality could have done, would be sought
for in vain in the mind and temper of the author himself. Yet even in
instances of this kind, a close examination will often detect, that the
irritability, which has been attributed to the author's genius as its
cause, did really originate in an ill conformation of body, obtuse pain,
or constitutional defect of pleasurable sensation. What is charged to
the author, belongs to the man, who would probably have been still more
impatient, but for the humanizing influences of the very pursuit, which
yet bears the blame of his irritability.
How then are we to explain the easy credence generally given to this
charge, if the charge itself be not, as I have endeavoured to show,
supported by experience? This seems to me of no very difficult solution.
In whatever country literature is widely diffused, there will be many
who mistake an intense desire to possess the reputation of poetic
genius, for the actual powers, and original tendencies which constitute
it. But men, whose dearest wishes are fixed on objects wholly out of
their own power, become in all cases more or less impatient and prone to
anger. Besides, though it may be paradoxical to assert, that a man can
know one thing and believe the opposite, yet assuredly a vain person may
have so habitually indulged the wish, and persevered in the attempt, to
appear what he is not, as to become himself one of his own proselytes.
Still, as this counterfeit and artificial persuasion must differ, even
in the person's own feelings, from a real sense of inward power, what
can be more natural, than that this difference should betray itself
in suspicious and jealous irritability? Even as the flowery sod, which
covers a hollow, may be often detected by its shaking and trembling.
But, alas! the multitude of books and the general diffusion of
literature, have produced other and more lamentable effects in the world
of letters, and such as are abundant to explain, though by no means to
justify, the contempt with which the best grounded complaints of injured
genius are rejected as frivolous, or entertained as matter of merriment.
In the days of Chaucer and Gower, our language might (with due allowance
for the imperfections of a simile) be compared to a wilderness of vocal
reeds, from which the favourites only of Pan or Apollo could construct
even the rude syrinx; and from this the constructors alone could elicit
strains of music. But now, partly by the labours of successive
poets, and in part by the more artificial state of society and social
intercourse, language, mechanized as it were into a barrel-organ,
supplies at once both instrument and tune. Thus even the deaf may play,
so as to delight the many. Sometimes (for it is with similes, as it
is with jests at a wine table, one is sure to suggest another) I have
attempted to illustrate the present state of our language, in its
relation to literature, by a press-room of larger and smaller stereotype
pieces, which, in the present Anglo-Gallican fashion of unconnected,
epigrammatic periods, it requires but an ordinary portion of ingenuity
to vary indefinitely, and yet still produce something, which, if not
sense, will be so like it as to do as well. Perhaps better: for it
spares the reader the trouble of thinking; prevents vacancy, while
it indulges indolence; and secures the memory from all danger of an
intellectual plethora. Hence of all trades, literature at present
demands the least talent or information; and, of all modes of
literature, the manufacturing of poems. The difference indeed between
these and the works of genius is not less than between an egg and an
egg-shell; yet at a distance they both look alike.
Now it is no less remarkable than true, with how little examination
works of polite literature are commonly perused, not only by the mass of
readers, but by men of first rate ability, till some accident or chance
[10] discussion have roused their attention, and put them on their
guard. And hence individuals below mediocrity not less in natural power
than in acquired knowledge; nay, bunglers who have failed in the lowest
mechanic crafts, and whose presumption is in due proportion to their
want of sense and sensibility; men, who being first scribblers
from idleness and ignorance, next become libellers from envy and
malevolence,--have been able to drive a successful trade in the
employment of the booksellers, nay, have raised themselves into
temporary name and reputation with the public at large, by that most
powerful of all adulation, the appeal to the bad and malignant passions
of mankind [11]. But as it is the nature of scorn, envy, and all
malignant propensities to require a quick change of objects, such
writers are sure, sooner or later, to awake from their dream of vanity
to disappointment and neglect with embittered and envenomed feelings.
Even during their short-lived success, sensible in spite of themselves
on what a shifting foundation it rests, they resent the mere refusal
of praise as a robbery, and at the justest censures kindle at once into
violent and undisciplined abuse; till the acute disease changing into
chronical, the more deadly as the less violent, they become the fit
instruments of literary detraction and moral slander. They are then no
longer to be questioned without exposing the complainant to ridicule,
because, forsooth, they are anonymous critics, and authorized, in Andrew
Marvell's phrase, as "synodical individuals" to speak of themselves
plurali majestatico! As if literature formed a caste, like that of
the Paras in Hindostan, who, however maltreated, must not dare to deem
themselves wronged! As if that, which in all other cases adds a deeper
dye to slander, the circumstance of its being anonymous, here acted
only to make the slanderer inviolable! [12] Thus, in part, from the
accidental tempers of individuals--(men of undoubted talent, but not
men of genius)--tempers rendered yet more irritable by their desire to
appear men of genius; but still more effectively by the excesses of the
mere counterfeits both of talent and genius; the number too being so
incomparably greater of those who are thought to be, than of those
who really are men of genius; and in part from the natural, but not
therefore the less partial and unjust distinction, made by the public
itself between literary and all other property; I believe the prejudice
to have arisen, which considers an unusual irascibility concerning the
reception of its products as characteristic of genius.
It might correct the moral feelings of a numerous class of readers, to
suppose a Review set on foot, the object of which should be to criticise
all the chief works presented to the public by our ribbon-weavers,
calico-printers, cabinet-makers, and china-manufacturers; which should
be conducted in the same spirit, and take the same freedom with personal
character, as our literary journals. They would scarcely, I think,
deny their belief, not only that the genus irritabile would be found
to include many other species besides that of bards; but that the
irritability of trade would soon reduce the resentments of poets into
mere shadow-fights in the comparison. Or is wealth the only rational
object of human interest? Or even if this were admitted, has the poet
no property in his works? Or is it a rare, or culpable case, that he
who serves at the altar of the Muses, should be compelled to derive
his maintenance from the altar, when too he has perhaps deliberately
abandoned the fairest prospects of rank and opulence in order to
devote himself, an entire and undistracted man, to the instruction or
refinement of his fellow-citizens? Or, should we pass by all higher
objects and motives, all disinterested benevolence, and even that
ambition of lasting praise which is at once the crutch and ornament,
which at once supports and betrays, the infirmity of human virtue,--is
the character and property of the man, who labours for our intellectual
pleasures, less entitled to a share of our fellow feeling, than that of
the wine-merchant or milliner? Sensibility indeed, both quick and deep,
is not only a characteristic feature, but may be deemed a component
part, of genius. But it is not less an essential mark of true genius,
that its sensibility is excited by any other cause more powerfully than
by its own personal interests; for this plain reason, that the man of
genius lives most in the ideal world, in which the present is still
constituted by the future or the past; and because his feelings have
been habitually associated with thoughts and images, to the number,
clearness, and vivacity of which the sensation of self is always in an
inverse proportion. And yet, should he perchance have occasion to repel
some false charge, or to rectify some erroneous censure, nothing is more
common than for the many to mistake the general liveliness of his manner
and language, whatever is the subject, for the effects of peculiar
irritation from its accidental relation to himself. [13]
For myself, if from my own feelings, or from the less suspicious test
of the observations of others, I had been made aware of any literary
testiness or jealousy; I trust, that I should have been, however,
neither silly nor arrogant enough to have burthened the imperfection on
genius. But an experience--(and I should not need documents in abundance
to prove my words, if I added)--a tried experience of twenty years, has
taught me, that the original sin of my character consists in a careless
indifference to public opinion, and to the attacks of those who
influence it; that praise and admiration have become yearly less and
less desirable, except as marks of sympathy; nay that it is difficult
and distressing to me to think with any interest even about the sale
and profit of my works, important as, in my present circumstances, such
considerations must needs be. Yet it never occurred to me to believe or
fancy, that the quantum of intellectual power bestowed on me by nature
or education was in any way connected with this habit of my feelings;
or that it needed any other parents or fosterers than constitutional
indolence, aggravated into languor by ill-health; the accumulating
embarrassments of procrastination; the mental cowardice, which is the
inseparable companion of procrastination, and which makes us anxious to
think and converse on any thing rather than on what concerns ourselves;
in fine, all those close vexations, whether chargeable on my faults
or my fortunes, which leave me but little grief to spare for evils
comparatively distant and alien.
Indignation at literary wrongs I leave to men born under happier stars.
I cannot afford it. But so far from condemning those who can, I deem
it a writer's duty, and think it creditable to his heart, to feel and
express a resentment proportioned to the grossness of the provocation,
and the importance of the object. There is no profession on earth, which
requires an attention so early, so long, or so unintermitting as that of
poetry; and indeed as that of literary composition in general, if it be
such as at all satisfies the demands both of taste and of sound logic.
How difficult and delicate a task even the mere mechanism of verse is,
may be conjectured from the failure of those, who have attempted poetry
late in life. Where then a man has, from his earliest youth, devoted
his whole being to an object, which by the admission of all civilized
nations in all ages is honourable as a pursuit, and glorious as an
attainment; what of all that relates to himself and his family, if only
we except his moral character, can have fairer claims to his protection,
or more authorize acts of self-defence, than the elaborate products of
his intellect and intellectual industry? Prudence itself would command
us to show, even if defect or diversion of natural sensibility had
prevented us from feeling, a due interest and qualified anxiety for the
offspring and representatives of our nobler being. I know it, alas! by
woful experience. I have laid too many eggs in the hot sands of this
wilderness, the world, with ostrich carelessness and ostrich oblivion.
The greater part indeed have been trod under foot, and are forgotten;
but yet no small number have crept forth into life, some to furnish
feathers for the caps of others, and still more to plume the shafts in
the quivers of my enemies, of them that unprovoked have lain in wait
against my soul.
Sic vos, non vobis, mellificatis, apes!
CHAPTER III
The Author's obligations to critics, and the probable
occasion--Principles of modern criticism--Mr. Southey's works and
character.
To anonymous critics in reviews, magazines, and news-journals of various
name and rank, and to satirists with or without a name in verse or
prose, or in verse-text aided by prose-comment, I do seriously believe
and profess, that I owe full two-thirds of whatever reputation and
publicity I happen to possess. For when the name of an individual has
occurred so frequently, in so many works, for so great a length of time,
the readers of these works--(which with a shelf or two of beauties,
elegant Extracts and Anas, form nine-tenths of the reading of the
reading Public [14])--cannot but be familiar with the name, without
distinctly remembering whether it was introduced for eulogy or for
censure. And this becomes the more likely, if (as I believe) the
habit of perusing periodical works may be properly added to Averroes'
catalogue of Anti-Mnemonics, or weakeners of the memory [15]. But where
this has not been the case, yet the reader will be apt to suspect that
there must be something more than usually strong and extensive in
a reputation, that could either require or stand so merciless
and long-continued a cannonading. Without any feeling of anger
therefore--(for which indeed, on my own account, I have no pretext)--I
may yet be allowed to express some degree of surprise, that, after
having run the critical gauntlet for a certain class of faults which
I had, nothing having come before the judgment-seat in the interim, I
should, year after year, quarter after quarter, month after month--(not
to mention sundry petty periodicals of still quicker revolution,
"or weekly or diurnal")--have been, for at least seventeen years
consecutively, dragged forth by them into the foremost ranks of the
proscribed, and forced to abide the brunt of abuse, for faults directly
opposite, and which I certainly had not. How shall I explain this?
Whatever may have been the case with others, I certainly cannot
attribute this persecution to personal dislike, or to envy, or to
feelings of vindictive animosity. Not to the former, for with the
exception of a very few who are my intimate friends, and were so before
they were known as authors, I have had little other acquaintance
with literary characters, than what may be implied in an accidental
introduction, or casual meeting in a mixed company. And as far as words
and looks can be trusted, I must believe that, even in these instances,
I had excited no unfriendly disposition. Neither by letter, nor in
conversation, have I ever had dispute or controversy beyond the common
social interchange of opinions. Nay, where I had reason to suppose my
convictions fundamentally different, it has been my habit, and I may
add, the impulse of my nature, to assign the grounds of my belief,
rather than the belief itself; and not to express dissent, till I could
establish some points of complete sympathy, some grounds common to both
sides, from which to commence its explanation.
Still less can I place these attacks to the charge of envy. The few
pages which I have published, are of too distant a date, and the extent
of their sale a proof too conclusive against their having been popular
at any time, to render probable, I had almost said possible, the
excitement of envy on their account; and the man who should envy me on
any other, verily he must be envy-mad!
Lastly, with as little semblance of reason, could I suspect any
animosity towards me from vindictive feelings as the cause. I have
before said, that my acquaintance with literary men has been limited and
distant; and that I have had neither dispute nor controversy. From my
first entrance into life, I have, with few and short intervals, lived
either abroad or in retirement. My different essays on subjects of
national interest, published at different times, first in the Morning
Post and then in the Courier, with my courses of Lectures on the
principles of criticism as applied to Shakespeare and Milton, constitute
my whole publicity; the only occasions on which I could offend any
member of the republic of letters. With one solitary exception in
which my words were first misstated and then wantonly applied to an
individual, I could never learn that I had excited the displeasure of
any among my literary contemporaries. Having announced my intention to
give a course of Lectures on the characteristic merits and defects of
English poetry in its different aeras; first, from Chaucer to Milton;
second, from Dryden inclusively to Thomson; and third, from Cowper to
the present day; I changed my plan, and confined my disquisition to the
former two periods, that I might furnish no possible pretext for the
unthinking to misconstrue, or the malignant to misapply my words, and
having stamped their own meaning on them, to pass them as current coin
in the marts of garrulity or detraction.
Praises of the unworthy are felt by ardent minds as robberies of the
deserving; and it is too true, and too frequent, that Bacon, Harrington,
Machiavel, and Spinoza, are not read, because Hume, Condillac, and
Voltaire are. But in promiscuous company no prudent man will oppugn
the merits of a contemporary in his own supposed department; contenting
himself with praising in his turn those whom he deems excellent. If
I should ever deem it my duty at all to oppose the pretensions of
individuals, I would oppose them in books which could be weighed and
answered, in which I could evolve the whole of my reasons and feelings,
with their requisite limits and modifications; not in irrecoverable
conversation, where however strong the reasons might be, the feelings
that prompted them would assuredly be attributed by some one or other
to envy and discontent. Besides I well know, and, I trust, have acted on
that knowledge, that it must be the ignorant and injudicious who extol
the unworthy; and the eulogies of critics without taste or judgment are
the natural reward of authors without feeling or genius. Sint unicuique
sua praemia.
How then, dismissing, as I do, these three causes, am I to account for
attacks, the long continuance and inveteracy of which it would require
all three to explain? The solution seems to be this,--I was in habits of
intimacy with Mr. Wordsworth and Mr. Southey! This, however, transfers,
rather than removes the difficulty. Be it, that, by an unconscionable
extension of the old adage, noscitur a socio, my literary friends are
never under the water-fall of criticism, but I must be wet through with
the spray; yet how came the torrent to descend upon them?
First then, with regard to Mr. Southey. I well remember the general
reception of his earlier publications; namely, the poems published with
Mr. Lovell under the names of Moschus and Bion; the two volumes of poems
under his own name, and the Joan of Arc. The censures of the critics by
profession are extant, and may be easily referred to:--careless lines,
inequality in the merit of the different poems, and (in the lighter
works) a predilection for the strange and whimsical; in short, such
faults as might have been anticipated in a young and rapid writer, were
indeed sufficiently enforced. Nor was there at that time wanting a party
spirit to aggravate the defects of a poet, who with all the courage of
uncorrupted youth had avowed his zeal for a cause, which he deemed
that of liberty, and his abhorrence of oppression by whatever name
consecrated. But it was as little objected by others, as dreamed of by
the poet himself, that he preferred careless and prosaic lines on rule
and of forethought, or indeed that he pretended to any other art or
theory of poetic diction, except that which we may all learn from
Horace, Quinctilian, the admirable dialogue, De Oratoribus, generally
attributed to Tacitus, or Strada's Prolusions; if indeed natural good
sense and the early study of the best models in his own language had
not infused the same maxims more securely, and, if I may venture the
expression, more vitally. All that could have been fairly deduced was,
that in his taste and estimation of writers Mr. Southey agreed far more
with Thomas Warton, than with Dr. Johnson. Nor do I mean to deny, that
at all times Mr. Southey was of the same mind with Sir Philip Sidney in
preferring an excellent ballad in the humblest style of poetry to twenty
indifferent poems that strutted in the highest. And by what have his
works, published since then, been characterized, each more strikingly
than the preceding, but by greater splendour, a deeper pathos,
profounder reflections, and a more sustained dignity of language and of
metre? Distant may the period be, but whenever the time shall come,
when all his works shall be collected by some editor worthy to be his
biographer, I trust that an appendix of excerpta of all the passages,
in which his writings, name, and character have been attacked, from
the pamphlets and periodical works of the last twenty years, may be an
accompaniment. Yet that it would prove medicinal in after times I dare
not hope; for as long as there are readers to be delighted with calumny,
there will be found reviewers to calumniate. And such readers will
become in all probability more numerous, in proportion as a still
greater diffusion of literature shall produce an increase of sciolists,
and sciolism bring with it petulance and presumption. In times of old,
books were as religious oracles; as literature advanced, they next
became venerable preceptors; they then descended to the rank of
instructive friends; and, as their numbers increased, they sank still
lower to that of entertaining companions; and at present they seem
degraded into culprits to hold up their hands at the bar of every
self-elected, yet not the less peremptory, judge, who chooses to write
from humour or interest, from enmity or arrogance, and to abide the
decision "of him that reads in malice, or him that reads after dinner. "
The same retrograde movement may be traced, in the relation which the
authors themselves have assumed towards their readers. From the lofty
address of Bacon: "these are the meditations of Francis of Verulam,
which that posterity should be possessed of, he deemed their interest:"
or from dedication to Monarch or Pontiff, in which the honour given was
asserted in equipoise to the patronage acknowledged: from Pindar's
------'ep' alloi--
si d'alloi megaloi: to d'eschaton kory-
phoutai basilensi. Maeketi
paptaine porsion.
