No More Learning

THESIS X

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER XIII

On the imagination, or esemplastic power


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

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

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

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


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

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

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

* * * * * *

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

"Dear C.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Your affectionate, etc. "


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

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

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




CHAPTER XIV

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER XV

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * * *

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

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

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




CHAPTER XVI

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


Christendom, from its first settlement on feudal rights, has been so
far one great body, however imperfectly organized, that a similar spirit
will be found in each period to have been acting in all its members.
The study of Shakespeare's poems--(I do not include his dramatic works,
eminently as they too deserve that title)--led me to a more careful
examination of the contemporary poets both in England and in other
countries. But my attention was especially fixed on those of Italy, from
the birth to the death of Shakespeare; that being the country in which
the fine arts had been most sedulously, and hitherto most successfully
cultivated. Abstracted from the degrees and peculiarities of individual
genius, the properties common to the good writers of each period seem
to establish one striking point of difference between the poetry of
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and that of the present age. The
remark may perhaps be extended to the sister art of painting. At least
the latter will serve to illustrate the former. In the present age the
poet--(I would wish to be understood as speaking generally, and without
allusion to individual names)--seems to propose to himself as his main
object, and as that which is the most characteristic of his art, new and
striking images; with incidents that interest the affections or excite
the curiosity. Both his characters and his descriptions he renders,
as much as possible, specific and individual, even to a degree of
portraiture. In his diction and metre, on the other hand, he is
comparatively careless. The measure is either constructed on no previous
system, and acknowledges no justifying principle but that of the
writer's convenience; or else some mechanical movement is adopted, of
which one couplet or stanza is so far an adequate specimen, as that the
occasional differences appear evidently to arise from accident, or the
qualities of the language itself, not from meditation and an intelligent
purpose. And the language from Pope's translation of Homer, to Darwin's
Temple of Nature [62], may, notwithstanding some illustrious exceptions,
be too faithfully characterized, as claiming to be poetical for no
better reason, than that it would be intolerable in conversation or in
prose. Though alas! even our prose writings, nay even the style of our
more set discourses, strive to be in the fashion, and trick themselves
out in the soiled and over-worn finery of the meretricious muse. It is
true that of late a great improvement in this respect is observable in
our most popular writers. But it is equally true, that this recurrence
to plain sense and genuine mother English is far from being general; and
that the composition of our novels, magazines, public harangues, and the
like is commonly as trivial in thought, and yet enigmatic in expression,
as if Echo and Sphinx had laid their heads together to construct it.
Nay, even of those who have most rescued themselves from this contagion,
I should plead inwardly guilty to the charge of duplicity or cowardice,
if I withheld my conviction, that few have guarded the purity of their
native tongue with that jealous care, which the sublime Dante in his
tract De la volgare Eloquenza, declares to be the first duty of a poet.
For language is the armoury of the human mind; and at once contains
the trophies of its past, and the weapons of its future conquests.
Animadverte, says Hobbes, quam sit ab improprietate verborum pronum
hominihus prolabi in errores circa ipsas res! Sat [vero], says
Sennertus, in hac vitae brevitate et naturae obscuritate, rerum est,
quibus cognoscendis tempus impendatur, ut [confusis et multivotis]
sermonibus intelligendis illud consumere opus non sit. [Eheu! quantas
strages paravere verba nubila, quae tot dicunt ut nihil dicunt;--nubes
potius, e quibus et in rebus politicis et in ecclesia turbines et
tonitrua erumpunt! ] Et proinde recte dictum putamus a Platone in Gorgia:
os an ta onomata eidei, eisetai kai ta pragmata: et ab Epicteto,
archae paideuseos hae ton onomaton episkepsis: et prudentissime Galenus
scribit, hae ton onomaton chraesis tarachtheisa kai taen ton pragmaton
epitarattei gnosin.

Egregie vero J. C. Scaliger, in Lib. I. de Plantis: Est primum, inquit,
sapientis officium, bene sentire, ut sibi vivat: proximum, bene loqui,
ut patriae vivat.

Something analogous to the materials and structure of modern poetry I
seem to have noticed--(but here I beg to be understood as speaking
with the utmost diffidence)--in our common landscape painters. Their
foregrounds and intermediate distances are comparatively unattractive:
while the main interest of the landscape is thrown into the background,
where mountains and torrents and castles forbid the eye to proceed, and
nothing tempts it to trace its way back again. But in the works of the
great Italian and Flemish masters, the front and middle objects of the
landscape are the most obvious and determinate, the interest gradually
dies away in the background, and the charm and peculiar worth of the
picture consists, not so much in the specific objects which it conveys
to the understanding in a visual language formed by the substitution of
figures for words, as in the beauty and harmony of the colours, lines,
and expression, with which the objects are represented. Hence novelty of
subject was rather avoided than sought for. Superior excellence in
the manner of treating the same subjects was the trial and test of the
artist's merit.

Not otherwise is it with the more polished poets of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, especially those of Italy. The imagery is almost
always general: sun, moon, flowers, breezes, murmuring streams, warbling
songsters, delicious shades, lovely damsels cruel as fair, nymphs,
naiads, and goddesses, are the materials which are common to all, and
which each shaped and arranged according to his judgment or fancy,
little solicitous to add or to particularize. If we make an honourable
exception in favour of some English poets, the thoughts too are as
little novel as the images; and the fable of their narrative poems,
for the most part drawn from mythology, or sources of equal notoriety,
derive their chief attractions from the manner of treating them; from
impassioned flow, or picturesque arrangement. In opposition to the
present age, and perhaps in as faulty an extreme, they placed the
essence of poetry in the art. The excellence, at which they aimed,
consisted in the exquisite polish of the diction, combined with perfect
simplicity. This their prime object they attained by the avoidance of
every word, which a gentleman would not use in dignified conversation,
and of every word and phrase, which none but a learned man would use;
by the studied position of words and phrases, so that not only each
part should be melodious in itself, but contribute to the harmony of
the whole, each note referring and conducting to the melody of all the
foregoing and following words of the same period or stanza; and lastly
with equal labour, the greater because unbetrayed, by the variation and
various harmonies of their metrical movement. Their measures, however,
were not indebted for their variety to the introduction of new metres,
such as have been attempted of late in the Alonzo and Imogen, and others
borrowed from the German, having in their very mechanism a specific
overpowering tune, to which the generous reader humours his voice and
emphasis, with more indulgence to the author than attention to the
meaning or quantity of the words; but which, to an ear familiar with the
numerous sounds of the Greek and Roman poets, has an effect not unlike
that of galloping over a paved road in a German stage-waggon without
springs. On the contrary, the elder bards both of Italy and England
produced a far greater as well as more charming variety by countless
modifications, and subtle balances of sound in the common metres of
their country. A lasting and enviable reputation awaits that man of
genius, who should attempt and realize a union;--who should recall the
high finish, the appropriateness, the facility, the delicate proportion,
and above all, the perfusive and omnipresent grace, which have
preserved, as in a shrine of precious amber, the Sparrow of Catullus,
the Swallow, the Grasshopper, and all the other little loves of
Anacreon; and which, with bright, though diminished glories, revisited
the youth and early manhood of Christian Europe, in the vales of [63]
Arno, and the groves of Isis and of Cam; and who with these should
combine the keener interest, deeper pathos, manlier reflection, and the
fresher and more various imagery, which give a value and a name that
will not pass away to the poets who have done honour to our own times,
and to those of our immediate predecessors.




CHAPTER 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.


As far then as Mr. Wordsworth in his preface contended, and most ably
contended, for a reformation in our poetic diction, as far as he has
evinced the truth of passion, and the dramatic propriety of those
figures and metaphors in the original poets, which, stripped of their
justifying reasons, and converted into mere artifices of connection or
ornament, constitute the characteristic falsity in the poetic style of
the moderns; and as far as he has, with equal acuteness and clearness,
pointed out the process by which this change was effected, and the
resemblances between that state into which the reader's mind is thrown
by the pleasurable confusion of thought from an unaccustomed train
of words and images; and that state which is induced by the natural
language of impassioned feeling; he undertook a useful task, and
deserves all praise, both for the attempt and for the execution. The
provocations to this remonstrance in behalf of truth and nature were
still of perpetual recurrence before and after the publication of this
preface. I cannot likewise but add, that the comparison of such poems
of merit, as have been given to the public within the last ten or twelve
years, with the majority of those produced previously to the appearance
of that preface, leave no doubt on my mind, that Mr. Wordsworth is fully
justified in believing his efforts to have been by no means ineffectual.
Not only in the verses of those who have professed their admiration
of his genius, but even of those who have distinguished themselves
by hostility to his theory, and depreciation of his writings, are the
impressions of his principles plainly visible. It is possible, that with
these principles others may have been blended, which are not equally
evident; and some which are unsteady and subvertible from the narrowness
or imperfection of their basis. But it is more than possible, that
these errors of defect or exaggeration, by kindling and feeding the
controversy, may have conduced not only to the wider propagation of the
accompanying truths, but that, by their frequent presentation to the
mind in an excited state, they may have won for them a more permanent
and practical result. A man will borrow a part from his opponent the
more easily, if he feels himself justified in continuing to reject a
part. While there remain important points in which he can still feel
himself in the right, in which he still finds firm footing for continued
resistance, he will gradually adopt those opinions, which were the least
remote from his own convictions, as not less congruous with his own
theory than with that which he reprobates. In like manner with a kind of
instinctive prudence, he will abandon by little and little his weakest
posts, till at length he seems to forget that they had ever belonged
to him, or affects to consider them at most as accidental and "petty
annexments," the removal of which leaves the citadel unhurt and
unendangered.

My own differences from certain supposed parts of Mr. Wordsworth's
theory ground themselves on the assumption, that his words had been
rightly interpreted, as purporting that the proper diction for poetry
in general consists altogether in a language taken, with due exceptions,
from the mouths of men in real life, a language which actually
constitutes the natural conversation of men under the influence of
natural feelings. My objection is, first, that in any sense this rule
is applicable only to certain classes of poetry; secondly, that even
to these classes it is not applicable, except in such a sense, as
hath never by any one (as far as I know or have read,) been denied or
doubted; and lastly, that as far as, and in that degree in which it
is practicable, it is yet as a rule useless, if not injurious, and
therefore either need not, or ought not to be practised. The poet
informs his reader, that he had generally chosen low and rustic life;
but not as low and rustic, or in order to repeat that pleasure of
doubtful moral effect, which persons of elevated rank and of superior
refinement oftentimes derive from a happy imitation of the rude
unpolished manners and discourse of their inferiors. For the pleasure
so derived may be traced to three exciting causes. The first is the
naturalness, in fact, of the things represented. The second is the
apparent naturalness of the representation, as raised and qualified
by an imperceptible infusion of the author's own knowledge and talent,
which infusion does, indeed, constitute it an imitation as distinguished
from a mere copy. The third cause may be found in the reader's conscious
feeling of his superiority awakened by the contrast presented to
him; even as for the same purpose the kings and great barons of yore
retained, sometimes actual clowns and fools, but more frequently shrewd
and witty fellows in that character. These, however, were not Mr.
Wordsworth's objects. He chose low and rustic life, "because in that
condition the essential passions of the heart find a better soil, in
which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and
speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that condition of
life our elementary feelings coexist in a state of greater simplicity,
and consequently may be more accurately contemplated, and more forcibly
communicated; because the manners of rural life germinate from
those elementary feelings; and from the necessary character of rural
occupations are more easily comprehended, and are more durable; and
lastly, because in that condition the passions of men are incorporated
with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature. "

Now it is clear to me, that in the most interesting of the poems, in
which the author is more or less dramatic, as THE BROTHERS, MICHAEL,
RUTH, THE MAD MOTHER, and others, the persons introduced are by no means
taken from low or rustic life in the common acceptation of those words!
and it is not less clear, that the sentiments and language, as far as
they can be conceived to have been really transferred from the minds
and conversation of such persons, are attributable to causes and
circumstances not necessarily connected with "their occupations and
abode. " The thoughts, feelings, language, and manners of the shepherd-
farmers in the vales of Cumberland and Westmoreland, as far as they are
actually adopted in those poems, may be accounted for from causes, which
will and do produce the same results in every state of life, whether in
town or country. As the two principal I rank that independence, which
raises a man above servitude, or daily toil for the profit of others,
yet not above the necessity of industry and a frugal simplicity
of domestic life; and the accompanying unambitious, but solid and
religious, education, which has rendered few books familiar, but the
Bible, and the Liturgy or Hymn book. To this latter cause, indeed, which
is so far accidental, that it is the blessing of particular countries
and a particular age, not the product of particular places or
employments, the poet owes the show of probability, that his personages
might really feel, think, and talk with any tolerable resemblance to his
representation. It is an excellent remark of Dr. Henry More's, that "a
man of confined education, but of good parts, by constant reading of the
Bible will naturally form a more winning and commanding rhetoric than
those that are learned: the intermixture of tongues and of artificial
phrases debasing their style. "

It is, moreover, to be considered that to the formation of healthy
feelings, and a reflecting mind, negations involve impediments not less
formidable than sophistication and vicious intermixture. I am
convinced, that for the human soul to prosper in rustic life a certain
vantage-ground is prerequisite. It is not every man that is likely to be
improved by a country life or by country labours. Education, or original
sensibility, or both, must pre-exist, if the changes, forms, and
incidents of nature are to prove a sufficient stimulant. And where
these are not sufficient, the mind contracts and hardens by want of
stimulants: and the man becomes selfish, sensual, gross, and hard-
hearted. Let the management of the Poor Laws in Liverpool, Manchester,
or Bristol be compared with the ordinary dispensation of the poor
rates in agricultural villages, where the farmers are the overseers and
guardians of the poor. If my own experience have not been particularly
unfortunate, as well as that of the many respectable country clergymen
with whom I have conversed on the subject, the result would engender
more than scepticism concerning the desirable influences of low and
rustic life in and for itself. Whatever may be concluded on the other
side, from the stronger local attachments and enterprising spirit of the
Swiss, and other mountaineers, applies to a particular mode of pastoral
life, under forms of property that permit and beget manners truly
republican, not to rustic life in general, or to the absence of
artificial cultivation. On the contrary the mountaineers, whose manners
have been so often eulogized, are in general better educated and greater
readers than men of equal rank elsewhere. But where this is not the
case, as among the peasantry of North Wales, the ancient mountains, with
all their terrors and all their glories, are pictures to the blind, and
music to the deaf.

I should not have entered so much into detail upon this passage,
but here seems to be the point, to which all the lines of difference
converge as to their source and centre;--I mean, as far as, and in
whatever respect, my poetic creed does differ from the doctrines
promulgated in this preface. I adopt with full faith, the principle of
Aristotle, that poetry, as poetry, is essentially ideal, that it avoids
and excludes all accident; that its apparent individualities of rank,
character, or occupation must be representative of a class; and that
the persons of poetry must be clothed with generic attributes, with the
common attributes of the class: not with such as one gifted individual
might possibly possess, but such as from his situation it is most
probable before-hand that he would possess. If my premises are right and
my deductions legitimate, it follows that there can be no poetic medium
between the swains of Theocritus and those of an imaginary golden age.

The characters of the vicar and the shepherd-mariner in the poem of THE
BROTHERS, and that of the shepherd of Green-head Ghyll in the MICHAEL,
have all the verisimilitude and representative quality, that the
purposes of poetry can require. They are persons of a known and
abiding class, and their manners and sentiments the natural product of
circumstances common to the class. Take Michael for instance:

An old man stout of heart, and strong of limb.
His bodily frame had been from youth to age
Of an unusual strength: his mind was keen,
Intense, and frugal, apt for all affairs,
And in his shepherd's calling he was prompt
And watchful more than ordinary men.
Hence he had learned the meaning of all winds,
Of blasts of every tone; and oftentimes
When others heeded not, He heard the South
Make subterraneous music, like the noise
Of bagpipers on distant Highland hills.
The Shepherd, at such warning, of his flock
Bethought him, and he to himself would say,
`The winds are now devising work for me! '
And truly, at all times, the storm, that drives
The traveller to a shelter, summoned him
Up to the mountains: he had been alone
Amid the heart of many thousand mists,
That came to him and left him on the heights.
So lived he, until his eightieth year was past.
And grossly that man errs, who should suppose
That the green valleys, and the streams and rocks,
Were things indifferent to the Shepherd's thoughts.
Fields, where with cheerful spirits he had breathed
The common air; the hills, which he so oft
Had climbed with vigorous steps; which had impressed
So many incidents upon his mind
Of hardship, skill or courage, joy or fear;
Which, like a book, preserved the memory
Of the dumb animals, whom he had saved,
Had fed or sheltered, linking to such acts,
So grateful in themselves, the certainty
Of honourable gain; these fields, these hills
Which were his living Being, even more
Than his own blood--what could they less? had laid
Strong hold on his affections, were to him
A pleasurable feeling of blind love,
The pleasure which there is in life itself.

On the other hand, in the poems which are pitched in a lower key, as the
HARRY GILL, and THE IDIOT BOY, the feelings are those of human nature in
general; though the poet has judiciously laid the scene in the country,
in order to place himself in the vicinity of interesting images, without
the necessity of ascribing a sentimental perception of their beauty
to the persons of his drama. In THE IDIOT BOY, indeed, the mother's
character is not so much the real and native product of a "situation
where the essential passions of the heart find a better soil, in which
they can attain their maturity and speak a plainer and more emphatic
language," as it is an impersonation of an instinct abandoned by
judgment. Hence the two following charges seem to me not wholly
groundless: at least, they are the only plausible objections, which I
have heard to that fine poem. The one is, that the author has not, in
the poem itself, taken sufficient care to preclude from the reader's
fancy the disgusting images of ordinary morbid idiocy, which yet it was
by no means his intention to represent. He was even by the "burr, burr,
burr," uncounteracted by any preceding description of the boy's beauty,
assisted in recalling them. The other is, that the idiocy of the boy
is so evenly balanced by the folly of the mother, as to present to the
general reader rather a laughable burlesque on the blindness of anile
dotage, than an analytic display of maternal affection in its ordinary
workings.

In THE THORN, the poet himself acknowledges in a note the necessity of
an introductory poem, in which he should have portrayed the character
of the person from whom the words of the poem are supposed to proceed:
a superstitious man moderately imaginative, of slow faculties and deep
feelings, "a captain of a small trading vessel, for example, who, being
past the middle age of life, had retired upon an annuity, or small
independent income, to some village or country town of which he was
not a native, or in which he had not been accustomed to live. Such men
having nothing to do become credulous and talkative from indolence.