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Crisis Chronicles Cyber Litmag (2008-2015)

~ Contemporary Poetry and Literary Classics from Cleveland to Infinity

Crisis Chronicles Cyber Litmag (2008-2015)

Category Archives: Coleridge (Samuel T)

Biographia Literaria – Chapter XXIV (by Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

11 Friday Jun 2010

Posted by Crisis Chronicles Press in 1800s, Autobiography, British, Coleridge (Samuel T), Philosophy, Writing

≈ 2 Comments

Samuel Taylor
Coleridge

Biographia
Literaria
by
Samuel
Taylor
Coleridge

Chapter XXIV [of
XXIV]                                                     [To
read other chapters,
click here.]


CONCLUSION
It sometimes happens that we are punished for our faults by incidents,
in the causation of which these faults had no share: and this I have
always felt the severest punishment. The wound indeed is of the same
dimensions; but the edges are jagged, and there is a dull underpain
that survives the smart which it had aggravated. For there is always a
consolatory feeling that accompanies the sense of a proportion between
antecedents and consequents. The sense of Before and After becomes
both intelligible and intellectual when, and only when, we contemplate
the succession in the relations of Cause and Effect, which, like the
two poles of the magnet manifest the being and unity of the one power
by relative opposites, and give, as it were, a substratum of
permanence, of identity, and therefore of reality, to the shadowy flux
of Time. It is Eternity revealing itself in the phaenomena of Time:
and the perception and acknowledgment of the proportionality and
appropriateness of the Present to the Past, prove to the afflicted
Soul, that it has not yet been deprived of the sight of God, that it
can still recognise the effective presence of a Father, though through
a darkened glass and a turbid atmosphere, though of a Father that is
chastising it. And for this cause, doubtless, are we so framed in
mind, and even so organized in brain and nerve, that all confusion is
painful. It is within the experience of many medical practitioners,
that a patient, with strange and unusual symptoms of disease, has been
more distressed in mind, more wretched, from the fact of being
unintelligible to himself and others, than from the pain or danger of
the disease: nay, that the patient has received the most solid
comfort, and resumed a genial and enduring cheerfulness, from some new
symptom or product, that had at once determined the name and nature of
his complaint, and rendered it an intelligible effect of an
intelligible cause: even though the discovery did at the same moment
preclude all hope of restoration. Hence the mystic theologians, whose
delusions we may more confidently hope to separate from their actual
intuitions, when we condescend to read their works without the
presumption that whatever our fancy, (always the ape, and too often
the adulterator and counterfeit of our memory,) has not made or cannot
make a picture of, must be nonsense,--hence, I say, the Mystics have
joined in representing the state of the reprobate spirits as a
dreadful dream in which there is no sense of reality, not even of the
pangs they are enduring--an eternity without time, and as it were
below it--God present without manifestation of his presence. But these
are depths, which we dare not linger over. Let us turn to an instance
more on a level with the ordinary sympathies of mankind. Here then,
and in this same healing influence of Light and distinct Beholding, we
may detect the final cause of that instinct which, in the great
majority of instances, leads, and almost compels the Afflicted to
communicate their sorrows. Hence too flows the alleviation that
results from "opening out our griefs: "which are thus presented in
distinguishable forms instead of the mist, through which whatever is
shapeless becomes magnified and (literally) enormous. Casimir, in the
fifth Ode of his third Book, has happily [85] expressed this thought.
Me longus silendi
Edit amor, facilesque luctus
Hausit medullas. Fugerit ocyus,
Simul negantem visere jusseris
Aures amicorum, et loquacem
Questibus evacuaris iram.
Olim querendo desinimus queri,
Ipsoque fletu lacryma perditur
Nec fortis [86] aeque, si per omnes
Cura volat residetque ramos.
Vires amicis perdit in auribus,
Minorque semper dividitur dolor,
Per multa permissus vagari
Pectora.--
I shall not make this an excuse, however, for troubling my readers
with any complaints or explanations, with which, as readers, they have
little or no concern. It may suffice, (for the present at least,) to
declare, that the causes that have delayed the publication of these
volumes for so long a period after they had been printed off, were not
connected with any neglect of my own; and that they would form an
instructive comment on the chapter concerning authorship as a trade,
addressed to young men of genius in the first volume of this work. I
remember the ludicrous effect produced on my mind by the fast sentence
of an auto-biography, which, happily for the writer, was as meagre in
incidents as it is well possible for the life of an individual to be--
"The eventful life which I am about to record, from the hour in which
I rose into existence on this planet, etc." Yet when, notwithstanding
this warning example of self-importance before me, I review my own
life, I cannot refrain from applying the same epithet to it, and with
more than ordinary emphasis--and no private feeling, that affected
myself only, should prevent me from publishing the same, (for write it
I assuredly shall, should life and leisure be granted me,) if
continued reflection should strengthen my present belief, that my
history would add its contingent to the enforcement of one important
truth, to wit, that we must not only love our neighbours as ourselves,
but ourselves likewise as our neighbours; and that we can do neither
unless we love God above both.
Who lives, that's not
Depraved or depraves? Who dies, that bears
Not one spurn to the grave of their friends' gift?
Strange as the delusion may appear, yet it is most true, that three
years ago I did not know or believe that I had an enemy in the world:
and now even my strongest sensations of gratitude are mingled with
fear, and I reproach myself for being too often disposed to ask,--Have
I one friend?--During the many years which intervened between the
composition and the publication of the CHRISTABEL, it became almost as
well known among literary men as if it had been on common sale; the
same references were made to it, and the same liberties taken with it,
even to the very names of the imaginary persons in the poem. From
almost all of our most celebrated poets, and from some with whom I had
no personal acquaintance, I either received or heard of expressions of
admiration that, (I can truly say,) appeared to myself utterly
disproportionate to a work, that pretended to be nothing more than a
common Faery Tale. Many, who had allowed no merit to my other poems,
whether printed or manuscript, and who have frankly told me as much,
uniformly made an exception in favour of the CHRISTABEL and the poem
entitled LOVE. Year after year, and in societies of the most different
kinds, I had been entreated to recite it and the result was still the
same in all, and altogether different in this respect from the effect
produced by the occasional recitation of any other poems I had
composed.--This before the publication. And since then, with very few
exceptions, I have heard nothing but abuse, and this too in a spirit
of bitterness at least as disproportionate to the pretensions of the
poem, had it been the most pitiably below mediocrity, as the previous
eulogies, and far more inexplicable.--This may serve as a warning to
authors, that in their calculations on the probable reception of a
poem, they must subtract to a large amount from the panegyric, which
may have encouraged them to publish it, however unsuspicious and
however various the sources of this panegyric may have been. And,
first, allowances must be made for private enmity, of the very
existence of which they had perhaps entertained no suspicion--for
personal enmity behind the mask of anonymous criticism: secondly for
the necessity of a certain proportion of abuse and ridicule in a
Review, in order to make it saleable, in consequence of which, if they
have no friends behind the scenes, the chance must needs be against
them; but lastly and chiefly, for the excitement and temporary
sympathy of feeling, which the recitation of the poem by an admirer,
especially if he be at once a warm admirer and a man of acknowledged
celebrity, calls forth in the audience. For this is really a species
of animal magnetism, in which the enkindling reciter, by perpetual
comment of looks and tones, lends his own will and apprehensive
faculty to his auditors. They live for the time within the dilated
sphere of his intellectual being. It is equally possible, though not
equally common, that a reader left to himself should sink below the
poem, as that the poem left to itself should flag beneath the feelings
of the reader.--But, in my own instance, I had the additional
misfortune of having been gossiped about, as devoted to metaphysics,
and worse than all, to a system incomparably nearer to the visionary
flights of Plato, and even to the jargon of the Mystics, than to the
established tenets of Locke. Whatever therefore appeared with my name
was condemned beforehand, as predestined metaphysics. In a dramatic
poem, which had been submitted by me to a gentleman of great influence
in the theatrical world, occurred the following passage:--
"O we are querulous creatures! Little less
Than all things can suffice to make us happy:
And little more than nothing is enough
To make us wretched."
Aye, here now! (exclaimed the critic) here come Coleridge's
metaphysics! And the very same motive (that is, not that the lines
were unfit for the present state of our immense theatres; but that
they were metaphysics [87]) was assigned elsewhere for the rejection
of the two following passages. The first is spoken in answer to a
usurper, who had rested his plea on the circumstance, that he had been
chosen by the acclamations of the people.--
"What people? How convened? or, if convened,
Must not the magic power that charms together
Millions of men in council, needs have power
To win or wield them? Rather, O far rather
Shout forth thy titles to yon circling mountains,
And with a thousand-fold reverberation
Make the rocks flatter thee, and the volleying air,
Unbribed, shout back to thee, King Emerick!
By wholesome laws to embank the sovereign power,
To deepen by restraint, and by prevention
Of lawless will to amass and guide the flood
In its majestic channel, is man's task
And the true patriot's glory! In all else
Men safelier trust to Heaven, than to themselves
When least themselves: even in those whirling crowds
Where folly is contagious, and too oft
Even wise men leave their better sense at home,
To chide and wonder at them, when returned."
The second passage is in the mouth of an old and experienced courtier,
betrayed by the man in whom he had most trusted.
"And yet Sarolta, simple, inexperienced,
Could see him as he was, and often warned me.
Whence learned she this?--O she was innocent!
And to be innocent is Nature's wisdom!
The fledge-dove knows the prowlers of the air,
Feared soon as seen, and flutters back to shelter.
And the young steed recoils upon his haunches,
The never-yet-seen adder's hiss first heard.
O surer than suspicion's hundred eyes
Is that fine sense, which to the pure in heart,
By mere oppugnancy of their own goodness,
Reveals the approach of evil."
As therefore my character as a writer could not easily be more injured
by an overt act than it was already in consequence of the report, I
published a work, a large portion of which was professedly
metaphysical. A long delay occurred between its first annunciation and
its appearance; it was reviewed therefore by anticipation with a
malignity, so avowedly and exclusively personal, as is, I believe,
unprecedented even in the present contempt of all common humanity that
disgraces and endangers the liberty of the press. After its
appearance, the author of this lampoon undertook to review it in the
Edinburgh Review; and under the single condition, that he should have
written what he himself really thought, and have criticised the work
as he would have done had its author been indifferent to him, I should
have chosen that man myself, both from the vigour and the originality
of his mind, and from his particular acuteness in speculative
reasoning, before all others.--I remembered Catullus's lines.
Desine de quoquam quicquam bene velle mereri,
Aut aliquem fieri posse putare pium.
Omnia sunt ingrata: nihil fecisse benigne est:
Immo, etiam taedet, taedet obestque magis;
Ut mihi, quem nemo gravius nec acerbius urget,
Quam modo qui me unum atque unicum amicum habuit.
But I can truly say, that the grief with which I read this rhapsody of
predetermined insult, had the rhapsodist himself for its whole and
sole object.
*     *     *     *     *     *
I refer to this review at present, in consequence of information
having been given me, that the inuendo of my "potential infidelity,"
grounded on one passage of my first Lay Sermon, has been received and
propagated with a degree of credence, of which I can safely acquit the
originator of the calumny. I give the sentences, as they stand in the
sermon, premising only that I was speaking exclusively of miracles
worked for the outward senses of men. "It was only to overthrow the
usurpation exercised in and through the senses, that the senses were
miraculously appealed to. REASON AND RELIGION ARE THEIR OWN EVIDENCE.
The natural sun is in this respect a symbol of the spiritual. Ere he
is fully arisen, and while his glories are still under veil, he calls
up the breeze to chase away the usurping vapours of the night-season,
and thus converts the air itself into the minister of its own
purification: not surely in proof or elucidation of the light from
heaven, but to prevent its interception."
"Wherever, therefore, similar circumstances co-exist with the same
moral causes, the principles revealed, and the examples recorded, in
the inspired writings, render miracles superfluous: and if we neglect
to apply truths in expectation of wonders, or under pretext of the
cessation of the latter, we tempt God, and merit the same reply which
our Lord gave to the Pharisees on a like occasion."
In the sermon and the notes both the historical truth and the
necessity of the miracles are strongly and frequently asserted. "The
testimony of books of history (that is, relatively to the signs and
wonders, with which Christ came) is one of the strong and stately
pillars of the church: but it is not the foundation!" Instead,
therefore, of defending myself, which I could easily effect by a
series of passages, expressing the same opinion, from the Fathers and
the most eminent Protestant Divines, from the Reformation to the
Revolution, I shall merely state what my belief is, concerning the
true evidences of Christianity.  1. Its consistency with right Reason,
I consider as the outer court of the temple--the common area, within
which it stands.  2. The miracles, with and through which the Religion
was first revealed and attested, I regard as the steps, the vestibule,
and the portal of the temple.  3. The sense, the inward feeling, in
the soul of each believer of its exceeding desirableness--the
experience, that he needs something, joined with the strong
foretokening, that the redemption and the graces propounded to us in
Christ are what he needs--this I hold to be the true foundation of the
spiritual edifice. With the strong a priori probability that flows in
from 1 and 3 on the correspondent historical evidence of 2, no man can
refuse or neglect to make the experiment without guilt. But, 4, it is
the experience derived from a practical conformity to the conditions
of the Gospel--it is the opening eye; the dawning light: the terrors
and the promises of spiritual growth; the blessedness of loving God as
God, the nascent sense of sin hated as sin, and of the incapability of
attaining to either without Christ; it is the sorrow that still rises
up from beneath and the consolation that meets it from above; the
bosom treacheries of the principal in the warfare and the exceeding
faithfulness and long-suffering of the uninteresting ally;--in a word,
it is the actual trial of the faith in Christ, with its accompaniments
and results, that must form the arched roof, and the faith itself is
the completing key-stone. In order to an efficient belief in
Christianity, a man must have been a Christian, and this is the
seeming argumentum in circulo, incident to all spiritual Truths, to
every subject not presentable under the forms of Time and Space, as
long as we attempt to master by the reflex acts of the Understanding
what we can only know by the act of becoming. Do the will of my
Father, and ye shall know whether I am of God. These four evidences I
believe to have been and still to be, for the world, for the whole
Church, all necessary, all equally necessary: but at present, and for
the majority of Christians born in Christian countries, I believe the
third and the fourth evidences to be the most operative, not as
superseding but as involving a glad undoubting faith in the two
former. Credidi, ideoque intellexi, appears to me the dictate equally
of Philosophy and Religion, even as I believe Redemption to be the
antecedent of Sanctification, and not its consequent. All spiritual
predicates may be construed indifferently as modes of Action or as
states of Being, Thus Holiness and Blessedness are the same idea, now
seen in relation to act and now to existence. The ready belief which
has been yielded to the slander of my "potential infidelity," I
attribute in part to the openness with which I have avowed my doubts,
whether the heavy interdict, under which the name of Benedict Spinoza
lies, is merited on the whole or to the whole extent. Be this as it
may, I wish, however, that I could find in the books of philosophy,
theoretical or moral, which are alone recommended to the present
students of theology in our established schools, a few passages as
thoroughly Pauline, as completely accordant with the doctrines of the
Established Church, as the following sentences in the concluding page
of Spinoza's Ethics. Deinde quo mens hoc amore divino, seu beatitudine
magis gaudet, eo plus intelligit, hoc est, eo majorem in affectus
habet potentiam, et eo minus ab affectibus, qui mali sunt, patitur;
atque adeo ex eo, quod mens hoc amore divino, seu beatitudine gaudet,
potestatem habet libidines coercendi; et quia humana potentia ad
coercendos affectus in solo intellectu consistit; ergo nemo
beatitudine gaudet, quia affectus coercuit, sed contra potestas
libidines coercendi ex ipsa beatitudine oritur.
With regard to the Unitarians, it has been shamelessly asserted, that
I have denied them to be Christians. God forbid! For how should I
know, what the piety of the heart may be, or what quantum of error in
the understanding may consist with a saving faith in the intentions
and actual dispositions of the whole moral being in any one
individual? Never will God reject a soul that sincerely loves him: be
his speculative opinions what they may: and whether in any given
instance certain opinions, be they unbelief, or misbelief, are
compatible with a sincere love of God, God can only know.--But this I
have said, and shall continue to say: that if the doctrines, the sum
of which I believe to constitute the truth in Christ, be Christianity,
then Unitarianism is not, and vice versa: and that, in speaking
theologically and impersonally, i.e. of Psilanthropism and
Theanthropism as schemes of belief, without reference to individuals,
who profess either the one or the other, it will be absurd to use a
different language as long as it is the dictate of common sense, that
two opposites cannot properly be called by the same name. I should
feel no offence if a Unitarian applied the same to me, any more than
if he were to say, that two and two being four, four and four must be
eight.
alla broton
ton men keneophrones auchai
ex agathon ebalon;
ton d' au katamemphthent' agan
ischun oikeion paresphalen kalon,
cheiros elkon opisso, thumos atolmos eon.
This has been my object, and this alone can be my defence--and O! that
with this my personal as well as my LITERARY LIFE might conclude!--the
unquenched desire I mean, not without the consciousness of having
earnestly endeavoured to kindle young minds, and to guard them against
the temptations of scorners, by showing that the scheme of
Christianity, as taught in the liturgy and homilies of our Church,
though not discoverable by human reason, is yet in accordance with it;
that link follows link by necessary consequence; that Religion passes
out of the ken of Reason only where the eye of Reason has reached its
own horizon; and that Faith is then but its continuation: even as the
day softens away into the sweet twilight, and twilight, hushed and
breathless, steals into the darkness. It is night, sacred night! the
upraised eye views only the starry heaven which manifests itself
alone: and the outward beholding is fixed on the sparks twinkling in
the awful depth, though suns of other worlds, only to preserve the
soul steady and collected in its pure act of inward adoration to the
great I AM, and to the filial WORD that re-affirmeth it from eternity
to eternity, whose choral echo is the universe.
THEO, MONO, DOXA.

[Here ends chapter 24.  To read other chapters of
Biographia Literaria, click here.]

* * * * * * * * * *

Footnotes by Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

[85] Classically too, as far as consists with the allegorizing fancy
of the modern, that still striving to project the inward,
contradistinguishes itself from the seeming ease with which the poetry
of the ancients reflects the world without. Casimir affords, perhaps,
the most striking instance of this characteristic difference.--For his
style and diction are really classical: while Cowley, who resembles
Casimir in many respects, completely barbarizes his Latinity, and even
his metre, by the heterogeneous nature of his thoughts. That Dr.
Johnson should have passed a contrary judgment, and have even
preferred Cowley's Latin Poems to Milton's, is a caprice that has, if I
mistake not, excited the surprise of all scholars. I was much amused
last summer with the laughable affright, with which an Italian poet
perused a page of Cowley's Davideis, contrasted with the enthusiasm
with which he first ran through, and then read aloud, Milton's Mansus
and Ad Patrem.
[86] Flectit, or if the metre had allowed, premit would have supported
the metaphor better.
[87] Poor unlucky Metaphysicks! and what are they? A single sentence
expresses the object and thereby the contents of this science. Gnothi
seauton:
Nosce te ipsum,
Tuque Deum, quantum licet, inque Deo omnia noscas.
Know thyself: and so shalt thou know God, as far as is permitted to a
creature, and in God all things.--Surely, there is a strange--nay,
rather too natural--aversion to many to know themselves.

  

Biographia Literaria – Chapter XXIII (by Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

11 Friday Jun 2010

Posted by Crisis Chronicles Press in 1800s, Autobiography, British, Coleridge (Samuel T), Philosophy, Writing

≈ 2 Comments

Samuel Taylor
Coleridge

Biographia
Literaria
by
Samuel
Taylor
Coleridge

Chapter XXIII [of
XXIV]                                                     [To
read other chapters,
click here.]


Quid quod praefatione praemunierim libellum, qua conor omnem
offendiculi ansam praecidere? [79] Neque quicquam addubito, quin ea
candidis omnibus faciat satis. Quid autem facias istis, qui vel ob
ingenii pertinaciam sibi satisfieri nolint, vel stupidiores sint, quam
ut satisfactionem intelligant? Nam quemadmodum Simonides dixit,
Thessalos hebetiores esse, quam ut possint a se decipi, ita quosdam
videas stupidiores, quam ut placari queant. Adhaec, non mirum est
invenire quod calumnietur, qui nihil aliud quaerit, nisi quod
calumnietur.                         ERASMUS ad Dorpium, Theologum.
In the rifacimento of THE FRIEND, I have inserted extracts from the
CONCIONES AD POPULUM, printed, though scarcely published, in the year
1795, in the very heat and height of my anti-ministerial enthusiasm:
these in proof that my principles of politics have sustained no
change.—In the present chapter, I have annexed to my Letters from
Germany, with particular reference to that, which contains a
disquisition on the modern drama, a critique on the Tragedy of
BERTRAM, written within the last twelve months: in proof, that I have
been as falsely charged with any fickleness in my principles of
taste.—The letter was written to a friend: and the apparent
abruptness with which it begins, is owing to the omission of the
introductory sentences.
You remember, my dear Sir, that Mr. Whitbread, shortly before his
death, proposed to the assembled subscribers of Drury Lane Theatre,
that the concern should be farmed to some responsible individual under
certain conditions and limitations: and that his proposal was
rejected, not without indignation, as subversive of the main object,
for the attainment of which the enlightened and patriotic assemblage
of philodramatists had been induced to risk their subscriptions. Now
this object was avowed to be no less than the redemption of the
British stage not only from horses, dogs, elephants, and the like
zoological rarities, but also from the more pernicious barbarisms and
Kotzebuisms in morals and taste. Drury Lane was to be restored to its
former classical renown; Shakespeare, Jonson, and Otway, with the
expurgated muses of Vanbrugh, Congreve, and Wycherley, were to be
reinaugurated in their rightful dominion over British audiences; and
the Herculean process was to commence, by exterminating the speaking
monsters imported from the banks of the Danube, compared with which
their mute relations, the emigrants from Exeter 'Change, and Polito
(late Pidcock's) show-carts, were tame and inoffensive. Could an
heroic project, at once so refined and so arduous, be consistently
entrusted to, could its success be rationally expected from, a
mercenary manager, at whose critical quarantine the lucri bonus odor
would conciliate a bill of health to the plague in person? No! As the
work proposed, such must be the work-masters. Rank, fortune, liberal
education, and (their natural accompaniments, or consequences)
critical discernment, delicate tact, disinterestedness, unsuspected
morals, notorious patriotism, and tried Maecenasship, these were the
recommendations that influenced the votes of the proprietary
subscribers of Drury Lane Theatre, these the motives that occasioned
the election of its Supreme Committee of Management. This circumstance
alone would have excited a strong interest in the public mind,
respecting the first production of the Tragic Muse which had been
announced under such auspices, and had passed the ordeal of such
judgments: and the tragedy, on which you have requested my judgment,
was the work on which the great expectations, justified by so many
causes, were doomed at length to settle.
But before I enter on the examination of BERTRAM, or THE CASTLE OF ST.
ALDOBRAND, I shall interpose a few words, on the phrase German Drama,
which I hold to be altogether a misnomer. At the time of Lessing, the
German stage, such as it was, appears to have been a flat and servile
copy of the French. It was Lessing who first introduced the name and
the works of Shakespeare to the admiration of the Germans; and I
should not perhaps go too far, if I add, that it was Lessing who first
proved to all thinking men, even to Shakespeare's own countrymen, the
true nature of his apparent irregularities. These, he demonstrated,
were deviations only from the accidents of the Greek tragedy; and from
such accidents as hung a heavy weight on the wings of the Greek poets,
and narrowed their flight within the limits of what we may call the
heroic opera. He proved, that, in all the essentials of art, no less
than in the truth of nature, the Plays of Shakespeare were
incomparably more coincident with the principles of Aristotle, than
the productions of Corneille and Racine, notwithstanding the boasted
regularity of the latter. Under these convictions were Lessing's own
dramatic works composed. Their deficiency is in depth and imagination:
their excellence is in the construction of the plot; the good sense of
the sentiments; the sobriety of the morals; and the high polish of the
diction and dialogue. In short, his dramas are the very antipodes of
all those which it has been the fashion of late years at once to abuse
and enjoy, under the name of the German drama. Of this latter,
Schiller's ROBBERS was the earliest specimen; the first fruits of his
youth, (I had almost said of his boyhood), and as such, the pledge,
and promise of no ordinary genius. Only as such, did the maturer
judgment of the author tolerate the Play. During his whole life he
expressed himself concerning this production with more than needful
asperity, as a monster not less offensive to good taste, than to sound
morals; and, in his latter years, his indignation at the unwonted
popularity of the ROBBERS seduced him into the contrary extremes, viz.
a studied feebleness of interest, (as far as the interest was to be
derived from incidents and the excitement of curiosity); a diction
elaborately metrical; the affectation of rhymes; and the pedantry of
the chorus.
But to understand the true character of the ROBBERS, and of the
countless imitations which were its spawn, I must inform you, or at
least call to your recollection, that, about that time, and for some
years before it, three of the most popular books in the German
language were, the translations Of YOUNG'S NIGHT THOUGHTS, HERVEY'S
MEDITATIONS, and RICHARDSON'S CLARISSA HARLOW. Now we have only to
combine the bloated style and peculiar rhythm of Hervey, which is
poetic only on account of its utter unfitness for prose, and might as
appropriately be called prosaic, from its utter unfitness for poetry;
we have only, I repeat, to combine these Herveyisms with the strained
thoughts, the figurative metaphysics and solemn epigrams of Young on
the one hand; and with the loaded sensibility, the minute detail, the
morbid consciousness of every thought and feeling in the whole flux
and reflux of the mind, in short the self-involution and dreamlike
continuity of Richardson on the other hand; and then to add the
horrific incidents, and mysterious villains, (geniuses of supernatural
intellect, if you will take the authors' words for it, but on a level
with the meanest ruffians of the condemned cells, if we are to judge
by their actions and contrivances)—to add the ruined castles, the
dungeons, the trap-doors, the skeletons, the flesh-and-blood ghosts,
and the perpetual moonshine of a modern author, (themselves the
literary brood of the CASTLE OF OTRANTO, the translations of which,
with the imitations and improvements aforesaid, were about that time
beginning to make as much noise in Germany as their originals were
making in England),—and as the compound of these ingredients duly
mixed, you will recognize the so-called German drama. The olla podrida
thus cooked up, was denounced, by the best critics in Germany, as the
mere cramps of weakness, and orgasms of a sickly imagination on the
part of the author, and the lowest provocation of torpid feeling on
that of the readers. The old blunder, however, concerning the
irregularity and wildness of Shakespeare, in which the German did but
echo the French, who again were but the echoes of our own critics, was
still in vogue, and Shakespeare was quoted as authority for the most
anti-Shakespearean drama. We have indeed two poets who wrote as one,
near the age of Shakespeare, to whom, (as the worst characteristic of
their writings), the Coryphaeus of the present drama may challenge the
honour of being a poor relation, or impoverished descendant. For if we
would charitably consent to forget the comic humour, the wit, the
felicities of style, in other words, all the poetry, and nine-tenths
of all the genius of Beaumont and Fletcher, that which would remain
becomes a Kotzebue.
The so-called German drama, therefore, is English in its origin,
English in its materials, and English by re-adoption; and till we can
prove that Kotzebue, or any of the whole breed of Kotzebues, whether
dramatists or romantic writers, or writers of romantic dramas, were
ever admitted to any other shelf in the libraries of well-educated
Germans than were occupied by their originals, and apes' apes in their
mother country, we should submit to carry our own brat on our own
shoulders; or rather consider it as a lack-grace returned from
transportation with such improvements only in growth and manners as
young transported convicts usually come home with.
I know nothing that contributes more to a clearer insight into the
true nature of any literary phaenomenon, than the comparison of it
with some elder production, the likeness of which is striking, yet
only apparent, while the difference is real. In the present case this
opportunity is furnished us, by the old Spanish play, entitled
Atheista Fulminato, formerly, and perhaps still, acted in the churches
and monasteries of Spain, and which, under various names (Don Juan,
the Libertine, etc.) has had its day of favour in every country
throughout Europe. A popularity so extensive, and of a work so
grotesque and extravagant, claims and merits philosophical attention
and investigation. The first point to be noticed is, that the play is
throughout imaginative. Nothing of it belongs to the real world, but
the names of the places and persons. The comic parts, equally with the
tragic; the living, equally with the defunct characters, are creatures
of the brain; as little amenable to the rules of ordinary probability,
as the Satan Of PARADISE LOST, or the Caliban of THE TEMPEST, and
therefore to be understood and judged of as impersonated abstractions.
Rank, fortune, wit, talent, acquired knowledge, and liberal
accomplishments, with beauty of person, vigorous health, and
constitutional hardihood,—all these advantages, elevated by the
habits and sympathies of noble birth and national character, are
supposed to have combined in Don Juan, so as to give him the means of
carrying into all its practical consequences the doctrine of a godless
nature, as the sole ground and efficient cause not only of all things,
events, and appearances, but likewise of all our thoughts, sensations,
impulses and actions. Obedience to nature is the only virtue: the
gratification of the passions and appetites her only dictate: each
individual's self-will the sole organ through which nature utters her
commands, and
"Self-contradiction is the only wrong!
For, by the laws of spirit, in the right
Is every individual character
That acts in strict consistence with itself."
That speculative opinions, however impious and daring they may be, are
not always followed by correspondent conduct, is most true, as well as
that they can scarcely in any instance be systematically realized, on
account of their unsuitableness to human nature and to the
institutions of society. It can be hell, only where it is all hell:
and a separate world of devils is necessary for the existence of any
one complete devil. But on the other hand it is no less clear, nor,
with the biography of Carrier and his fellow atheists before us, can
it be denied without wilful blindness, that the (so called) system of
nature (that is, materialism, with the utter rejection of moral
responsibility, of a present Providence, and of both present and
future retribution) may influence the characters and actions of
individuals, and even of communities, to a degree that almost does
away the distinction between men and devils, and will make the page of
the future historian resemble the narration of a madman's dreams. It
is not the wickedness of Don Juan, therefore, which constitutes the
character an abstraction, and removes it from the rules of
probability; but the rapid succession of the correspondent acts and
incidents, his intellectual superiority, and the splendid accumulation
of his gifts and desirable qualities, as co-existent with entire
wickedness in one and the same person. But this likewise is the very
circumstance which gives to this strange play its charm and universal
interest. Don Juan is, from beginning to end, an intelligible
character: as much so as the Satan of Milton. The poet asks only of
the reader, what, as a poet, he is privileged to ask: namely, that
sort of negative faith in the existence of such a being, which we
willingly give to productions professedly ideal, and a disposition to
the same state of feeling, as that with which we contemplate the
idealized figures of the Apollo Belvidere, and the Farnese Hercules.
What the Hercules is to the eye in corporeal strength, Don Juan is to
the mind in strength of character. The ideal consists in the happy
balance of the generic with the individual. The former makes the
character representative and symbolical, therefore instructive;
because, mutatis mutandis, it is applicable to whole classes of men.
The latter gives it living interest; for nothing lives or is real, but
as definite and individual. To understand this completely, the reader
need only recollect the specific state of his feelings, when in
looking at a picture of the historic (more properly of the poetic or
heroic) class, he objects to a particular figure as being too much of
a portrait; and this interruption of his complacency he feels without
the least reference to, or the least acquaintance with, any person in
real life whom he might recognise in this figure. It is enough that
such a figure is not ideal: and therefore not ideal, because one of
the two factors or elements of the ideal is in excess. A similar and
more powerful objection he would feel towards a set of figures which
were mere abstractions, like those of Cipriani, and what have been
called Greek forms and faces, that is, outlines drawn according to a
recipe. These again are not ideal; because in these the other element
is in excess. "Forma formans per formam formatam translucens," [80] is
the definition and perfection of ideal art.
This excellence is so happily achieved in the Don Juan, that it is
capable of interesting without poetry, nay, even without words, as in
our pantomime of that name. We see clearly how the character is
formed; and the very extravagance of the incidents, and the super-
human entireness of Don Juan's agency, prevents the wickedness from
shocking our minds to any painful degree. We do not believe it enough
for this effect; no, not even with that kind of temporary and negative
belief or acquiescence which I have described above. Meantime the
qualities of his character are too desirable, too flattering to our
pride and our wishes, not to make up on this side as much additional
faith as was lost on the other. There is no danger (thinks the
spectator or reader) of my becoming such a monster of iniquity as Don
Juan! I never shall be an atheist! I shall never disallow all
distinction between right and wrong! I have not the least inclination
to be so outrageous a drawcansir in my love affairs! But to possess
such a power of captivating and enchanting the affections of the other
sex!--to be capable of inspiring in a charming and even a virtuous
woman, a love so deep, and so entirely personal to me!--that even my
worst vices, (if I were vicious), even my cruelty and perfidy, (if I
were cruel and perfidious), could not eradicate the passion!--to be so
loved for my own self, that even with a distinct knowledge of my
character, she yet died to save me!--this, sir, takes hold of two
sides of our nature, the better and the worse. For the heroic
disinterestedness, to which love can transport a woman, can not be
contemplated without an honourable emotion of reverence towards
womanhood: and, on the other hand, it is among the miseries, and
abides in the dark ground-work of our nature, to crave an outward
confirmation of that something within us, which is our very self, that
something, not made up of our qualities and relations, but itself the
supporter and substantial basis of all these. Love me, and not my
qualities, may be a vicious and an insane wish, but it is not a wish
wholly without a meaning.
Without power, virtue would be insufficient and incapable of revealing
its being. It would resemble the magic transformation of Tasso's
heroine into a tree, in which she could only groan and bleed. Hence
power is necessarily an object of our desire and of our admiration.
But of all power, that of the mind is, on every account, the grand
desideratum of human ambition. We shall be as Gods in knowledge, was
and must have been the first temptation: and the coexistence of great
intellectual lordship with guilt has never been adequately represented
without exciting the strongest interest, and for this reason, that in
this bad and heterogeneous co-ordination we can contemplate the
intellect of man more exclusively as a separate self-subsistence, than
in its proper state of subordination to his own conscience, or to the
will of an infinitely superior being.
This is the sacred charm of Shakespeare's male characters in general.
They are all cast in the mould of Shakespeare's own gigantic
intellect; and this is the open attraction of his Richard, Iago,
Edmund, and others in particular. But again; of all intellectual
power, that of superiority to the fear of the invisible world is the
most dazzling. Its influence is abundantly proved by the one
circumstance, that it can bribe us into a voluntary submission of our
better knowledge, into suspension of all our judgment derived from
constant experience, and enable us to peruse with the liveliest
interest the wildest tales of ghosts, wizards, genii, and secret
talismans. On this propensity, so deeply rooted in our nature, a
specific dramatic probability may be raised by a true poet, if the
whole of his work be in harmony: a dramatic probability, sufficient
for dramatic pleasure, even when the component characters and
incidents border on impossibility. The poet does not require us to be
awake and believe; he solicits us only to yield ourselves to a dream;
and this too with our eyes open, and with our judgment perdue behind
the curtain, ready to awaken us at the first motion of our will: and
meantime, only, not to disbelieve. And in such a state of mind, who
but must be impressed with the cool intrepidity of Don john on the
appearance of his father's ghost:
"GHOST.—Monster! behold these wounds!
"D. JOHN.—I do! They were well meant and well performed, I see.
"GHOST.———Repent, repent of all thy villanies.
My clamorous blood to heaven for vengeance cries,
Heaven will pour out his judgments on you all.
Hell gapes for you, for you each fiend doth call,
And hourly waits your unrepenting fall.
You with eternal horrors they'll torment,
Except of all your crimes you suddenly repent. (Ghost sinks.)
"D. JOHN.—Farewell, thou art a foolish ghost. Repent, quoth he!
what could this mean? Our senses are all in a mist sure.
"D. ANTONIO.—(one of D. Juan's reprobate companions.) They are not!
'Twas a ghost.
"D. LOPEZ.—(another reprobate.) I ne'er believed those foolish tales
before.
"D. JOHN.—Come! 'Tis no matter. Let it be what it will, it must be
natural.
"D. ANT.—And nature is unalterable in us too.
"D. JOHN.—'Tis true! The nature of a ghost can not change our's."
Who also can deny a portion of sublimity to the tremendous consistency
with which he stands out the last fearful trial, like a second
Prometheus?
"Chorus of Devils.
"STATUE-GHOST.—Will you not relent and feel remorse?
"D. JOHN.—Could'st thou bestow another heart on me I might. But
with this heart I have, I can not.
"D. LOPEZ.—These things are prodigious.
"D. ANTON.—I have a sort of grudging to relent, but something holds
me back.
"D. LOP.—If we could, 'tis now too late. I will not.
"D. ANT.—We defy thee!
"GHOST.—Perish ye impious wretches, go and find the punishments laid
up in store for you!
(Thunder and lightning. D. Lop. and D. Ant. are swallowed up.)
"GHOST To D. JOHN.—Behold their dreadful fates, and know that thy
last moment's come!
"D. JOHN.—Think not to fright me, foolish ghost; I'll break your
marble body in pieces and pull down your horse.
(Thunder and lightning—chorus of devils, etc.)
"D. JOHN.—These things I see with wonder, but no fear.
Were all the elements to be confounded,
And shuffled all into their former chaos;
Were seas of sulphur flaming round about me,
And all mankind roaring within those fires,
I could not fear, or feel the least remorse.
To the last instant I would dare thy power.
Here I stand firm, and all thy threats contemn.
Thy murderer (to the ghost of one whom he had murdered)
Stands here! Now do thy worst!"
(He is swallowed up in a cloud of fire.)
In fine the character of Don John consists in the union of every thing
desirable to human nature, as means, and which therefore by the well
known law of association becomes at length desirable on their own
account. On their own account, and, in their own dignity, they are
here displayed, as being employed to ends so unhuman, that in the
effect, they appear almost as means without an end. The ingredients
too are mixed in the happiest proportion, so as to uphold and relieve
each other—more especially in that constant interpoise of wit,
gaiety, and social generosity, which prevents the criminal, even in
his most atrocious moments, from sinking into the mere ruffian, as far
at least, as our imagination sits in judgment. Above all, the fine
suffusion through the whole, with the characteristic manners and
feelings, of a highly bred gentleman gives life to the drama. Thus
having invited the statue-ghost of the governor, whom he had murdered,
to supper, which invitation the marble ghost accepted by a nod of the
head, Don John has prepared a banquet.
"D. JOHN.—Some wine, sirrah! Here's to Don Pedro's ghost—he should
have been welcome.
"D. LOP.—The rascal is afraid of you after death.
(One knocks hard at the door.)
"D. JOHN.—(to the servant)—Rise and do your duty.
"SERV.—Oh the devil, the devil!  (Marble ghost enters.)
"D. JOHN.—Ha! 'tis the ghost! Let's rise and receive him! Come,
Governour, you are welcome, sit there; if we had thought you would
have come, we would have staid for you.
*     *     *     *     *     *
Here, Governour, your health! Friends, put it about! Here's
excellent meat, taste of this ragout. Come, I'll help you, come
eat, and let old quarrels be forgotten.  (The ghost threatens him
with vengeance.)
"D. JOHN.—We are too much confirmed—curse on this dry discourse.
Come, here's to your mistress, you had one when you were living:
not forgetting your sweet sister.                (devils enter.)
"D. JOHN.—Are these some of your retinue? Devils, say you? I'm
sorry I have no burnt brandy to treat 'em with, that's drink fit
for devils," etc.
Nor is the scene from which we quote interesting, in dramatic
probability alone; it is susceptible likewise of a sound moral; of a
moral that has more than common claims on the notice of a too numerous
class, who are ready to receive the qualities of gentlemanly courage,
and scrupulous honour, (in all the recognised laws of honour,) as the
substitutes of virtue, instead of its ornaments. This, indeed, is the
moral value of the play at large, and that which places it at a
world's distance from the spirit of modern jacobinism. The latter
introduces to us clumsy copies of these showy instrumental qualities,
in order to reconcile us to vice and want of principle; while the
Atheista Fulminato presents an exquisite portraiture of the same
qualities, in all their gloss and glow, but presents them for the sole
purpose of displaying their hollowness, and in order to put us on our
guard by demonstrating their utter indifference to vice and virtue,
whenever these and the like accomplishments are contemplated for
themselves alone.
Eighteen years ago I observed, that the whole secret of the modern
jacobinical drama, (which, and not the German, is its appropriate
designation,) and of all its popularity, consists in the confusion and
subversion of the natural order of things in their causes and effects:
namely, in the excitement of surprise by representing the qualities of
liberality, refined feeling, and a nice sense of honour (those things
rather which pass amongst us for such) in persons and in classes where
experience teaches us least to expect them; and by rewarding with all
the sympathies which are the due of virtue, those criminals whom law,
reason, and religion have excommunicated from our esteem.
This of itself would lead me back to BERTRAM, or the CASTLE OF ST.
ALDOBRAND; but, in my own mind, this tragedy was brought into
connection with THE LIBERTINE, (Shadwell's adaptation of the Atheista
Fulminato to the English stage in the reign of Charles the Second,) by
the fact, that our modern drama is taken, in the substance of it, from
the first scene of the third act of THE LIBERTINE. But with what
palpable superiority of judgment in the original! Earth and hell, men
and spirits are up in arms against Don John; the two former acts of
the play have not only prepared us for the supernatural, but
accustomed us to the prodigious. It is, therefore, neither more nor
less than we anticipate when the Captain exclaims: "In all the dangers
I have been, such horrors I never knew. I am quite unmanned:" and when
the Hermit says, that he had "beheld the ocean in wildest rage, yet
ne'er before saw a storm so dreadful, such horrid flashes of
lightning, and such claps of thunder, were never in my remembrance."
And Don John's burst of startling impiety is equally intelligible in
its motive, as dramatic in its effect.
But what is there to account for the prodigy of the tempest at
Bertram's shipwreck? It is a mere supernatural effect, without even a
hint of any supernatural agency; a prodigy, without any circumstance
mentioned that is prodigious; and a miracle introduced without a
ground, and ending without a result. Every event and every scene of
the play might have taken place as well if Bertram and his vessel had
been driven in by a common hard gale, or from want of provisions. The
first act would have indeed lost its greatest and most sonorous
picture; a scene for the sake of a scene, without a word spoken; as
such, therefore, (a rarity without a precedent), we must take it, and
be thankful! In the opinion of not a few, it was, in every sense of
the word, the best scene in the play. I am quite certain it was the
most innocent: and the steady, quiet uprightness of the flame of the
wax-candles, which the monks held over the roaring billows amid the
storm of wind and rain, was really miraculous.
The Sicilian sea coast: a convent of monks: night: a most portentous,
unearthly storm: a vessel is wrecked contrary to all human
expectation, one man saves himself by his prodigious powers as a
swimmer, aided by the peculiarity of his destination—
"PRIOR.———All, all did perish
FIRST MONK.—Change, change those drenched weeds—
PRIOR.—I wist not of them—every soul did perish—
Enter third Monk hastily.
"THIRD MONK.—No, there was one did battle with the storm
With careless desperate force; full many times
His life was won and lost, as tho' he recked not—
No hand did aid him, and he aided none—
Alone he breasted the broad wave, alone
That man was saved."
Well! This man is led in by the monks, supposed dripping wet, and to
very natural inquiries he either remains silent, or gives most brief
and surly answers, and after three or four of these half-line
courtesies, "dashing off the monks" who had saved him, he exclaims in
the true sublimity of our modern misanthropic heroism—
"Off! ye are men—there's poison in your touch.
But I must yield, for this" (what?) "hath left me strengthless."
So end the three first scenes. In the next (the Castle of St.
Aldobrand,) we find the servants there equally frightened with this
unearthly storm, though wherein it differed from other violent storms
we are not told, except that Hugo informs us, page 9—
"PIET.—Hugo, well met. Does e'en thy age bear
Memory of so terrible a storm?
HUGO.—They have been frequent lately.
PIET.—They are ever so in Sicily.
HUGO.—So it is said. But storms when I was young
Would still pass o'er like Nature's fitful fevers,
And rendered all more wholesome. Now their rage,
Sent thus unseasonable and profitless,
Speaks like the threats of heaven."
A most perplexing theory of Sicilian storms is this of old Hugo! and
what is very remarkable, not apparently founded on any great
familiarity of his own with this troublesome article. For when Pietro
asserts the "ever more frequency" of tempests in Sicily, the old man
professes to know nothing more of the fact, but by hearsay. "So it is
said."—But why he assumed this storm to be unseasonable, and on what
he grounded his prophecy, (for the storm is still in full fury), that
it would be profitless, and without the physical powers common to all
other violent sea-winds in purifying the atmosphere, we are left in
the dark; as well concerning the particular points in which he knew
it, during its continuance, to differ from those that he had been
acquainted with in his youth. We are at length introduced to the Lady
Imogine, who, we learn, had not rested "through" the night; not on
account of the tempest, for
"Long ere the storm arose, her restless gestures
Forbade all hope to see her blest with sleep."
Sitting at a table, and looking at a portrait, she informs us—First,
that portrait-painters may make a portrait from memory,
"The limner's art may trace the absent feature."
For surely these words could never mean, that a painter may have a
person sit to him who afterwards may leave the room or perhaps the
country? Secondly, that a portrait-painter can enable a mourning lady
to possess a good likeness of her absent lover, but that the portrait-
painter cannot, and who shall—
"Restore the scenes in which they met and parted?"
The natural answer would have been—Why the scene-painter to be sure!
But this unreasonable lady requires in addition sundry things to be
painted that have neither lines nor colours—
"The thoughts, the recollections, sweet and bitter,
Or the Elysian dreams of lovers when they loved."
Which last sentence must be supposed to mean; when they were present,
and making love to each other.—Then, if this portrait could speak, it
would "acquit the faith of womankind." How? Had she remained constant?
No, she has been married to another man, whose wife she now is. How
then? Why, that, in spite of her marriage vow, she had continued to
yearn and crave for her former lover—
"This has her body, that her mind:
Which has the better bargain?"
The lover, however, was not contented with this precious arrangement,
as we shall soon find. The lady proceeds to inform us that during the
many years of their separation, there have happened in the different
parts of the world, a number of "such things;" even such, as in a
course of years always have, and till the Millennium, doubtless always
will happen somewhere or other. Yet this passage, both in language and
in metre, is perhaps amongst the best parts of the play. The lady's
love companion and most esteemed attendant, Clotilda, now enters and
explains this love and esteem by proving herself a most passive and
dispassionate listener, as well as a brief and lucky querist, who asks
by chance, questions that we should have thought made for the very
sake of the answers. In short, she very much reminds us of those
puppet-heroines, for whom the showman contrives to dialogue without
any skill in ventriloquism. This, notwithstanding, is the best scene
in the Play, and though crowded with solecisms, corrupt diction, and
offences against metre, would possess merits sufficient to out-weigh
them, if we could suspend the moral sense during the perusal. It tells
well and passionately the preliminary circumstances, and thus
overcomes the main difficulty of most first acts, to wit, that of
retrospective narration. It tells us of her having been honourably
addressed by a noble youth, of rank and fortune vastly superior to her
own: of their mutual love, heightened on her part by gratitude; of his
loss of his sovereign's favour; his disgrace; attainder; and flight;
that he (thus degraded) sank into a vile ruffian, the chieftain of a
murderous banditti; and that from the habitual indulgence of the most
reprobate habits and ferocious passions, he had become so changed,
even in appearance, and features,
"That she who bore him had recoiled from him,
Nor known the alien visage of her child,
Yet still she (Imogine) lov'd him."
She is compelled by the silent entreaties of a father, perishing with
"bitter shameful want on the cold earth," to give her hand, with a
heart thus irrecoverably pre-engaged, to Lord Aldobrand, the enemy of
her lover, even to the very man who had baffled his ambitious schemes,
and was, at the present time, entrusted with the execution of the
sentence of death which had been passed on Bertram. Now, the proof of
"woman's love," so industriously held forth for the sympathy, if not
for the esteem of the audience, consists in this, that, though Bertram
had become a robber and a murderer by trade, a ruffian in manners,
yea, with form and features at which his own mother could not but
"recoil," yet she (Lady Imogine) "the wife of a most noble, honoured
Lord," estimable as a man, exemplary and affectionate as a husband,
and the fond father of her only child—that she, notwithstanding all
this, striking her heart, dares to say to it—
"But thou art Bertram's still, and Bertram's ever."
A Monk now enters, and entreats in his Prior's name for the wonted
hospitality, and "free noble usage" of the Castle of St. Aldobrand for
some wretched shipwrecked souls, and from this we learn, for the first
time, to our infinite surprise, that notwithstanding the
supernaturalness of the storm aforesaid, not only Bertram, but the
whole of his gang, had been saved, by what means we are left to
conjecture, and can only conclude that they had all the same desperate
swimming powers, and the same saving destiny as the hero, Bertram
himself. So ends the first act, and with it the tale of the events,
both those with which the tragedy begins, and those which had occurred
previous to the date of its commencement. The second displays Bertram
in disturbed sleep, which the Prior, who hangs over him, prefers
calling a "starting trance," and with a strained voice, that would
have awakened one of the seven sleepers, observes to the audience—
"How the lip works! How the bare teeth do grind!
And beaded drops course [81] down his writhen brow!"
The dramatic effect of which passage we not only concede to the
admirers of this tragedy, but acknowledge the further advantages of
preparing the audience for the most surprising series of wry faces,
proflated mouths, and lunatic gestures that were ever "launched" on an
audience to "sear the sense." [82]
"PRIOR.—I will awake him from this horrid trance. This is no
natural sleep! Ho, wake thee, stranger!"
This is rather a whimsical application of the verb reflex we must
confess, though we remember a similar transfer of the agent to the
patient in a manuscript tragedy, in which the Bertram of the piece,
prostrating a man with a single blow of his fist, exclaims—"Knock me
thee down, then ask thee if thou liv'st." Well; the stranger obeys,
and whatever his sleep might have been, his waking was perfectly
natural; for lethargy itself could not withstand the scolding
Stentorship of Mr. Holland, the Prior. We next learn from the best
authority, his own confession, that the misanthropic hero, whose
destiny was incompatible with drowning, is Count Bertram, who not only
reveals his past fortunes, but avows with open atrocity, his Satanic
hatred of Imogine's lord, and his frantick thirst of revenge; and so
the raving character raves, and the scolding character scolds—and
what else? Does not the Prior act? Does he not send for a posse of
constables or thief-takers to handcuff the villain, or take him either
to Bedlam or Newgate? Nothing of the kind; the author preserves the
unity of character, and the scolding Prior from first to last does
nothing but scold, with the exception indeed of the last scene of the
last act, in which, with a most surprising revolution, he whines,
weeps, and kneels to the condemned blaspheming assassin out of pure
affection to the high-hearted man, the sublimity of whose angel-sin
rivals the star-bright apostate, (that is, who was as proud as
Lucifer, and as wicked as the Devil), and, "had thrilled him," (Prior
Holland aforesaid), with wild admiration.
Accordingly in the very next scene, we have this tragic Macheath, with
his whole gang, in the Castle of St. Aldobrand, without any attempt on
the Prior's part either to prevent him, or to put the mistress and
servants of the Castle on their guard against their new inmates;
though he (the Prior) knew, and confesses that he knew, that Bertram's
"fearful mates" were assassins so habituated and naturalized to guilt,
that—
"When their drenched hold forsook both gold and gear,
They griped their daggers with a murderer's instinct;"
and though he also knew, that Bertram was the leader of a band whose
trade was blood. To the Castle however he goes, thus with the holy
Prior's consent, if not with his assistance; and thither let us follow
him.
No sooner is our hero safely housed in the Castle of St. Aldobrand,
than he attracts the notice of the lady and her confidante, by his
"wild and terrible dark eyes," "muffled form," "fearful form," [83]
"darkly wild," "proudly stern," and the like common-place indefinites,
seasoned by merely verbal antitheses, and at best, copied with very
slight change, from the Conrade of Southey's JOAN OF ARC. The lady
Imogine, who has been, (as is the case, she tells us, with all soft
and solemn spirits,) worshipping the moon on a terrace or rampart
within view of the Castle, insists on having an interview with our
hero, and this too tete-a-tete. Would the reader learn why and
wherefore the confidante is excluded, who very properly remonstrates
against such "conference, alone, at night, with one who bears such
fearful form;" the reason follows—"why, therefore send him!" I say,
follows, because the next line, "all things of fear have lost their
power over me," is separated from the former by a break or pause, and
besides that it is a very poor answer to the danger, is no answer at
all to the gross indelicacy of this wilful exposure. We must therefore
regard it as a mere after-thought, that a little softens the rudeness,
but adds nothing to the weight, of that exquisite woman's reason
aforesaid. And so exit Clotilda and enter Bertram, who "stands without
looking at her," that is, with his lower limbs forked, his arms
akimbo, his side to the lady's front, the whole figure resembling an
inverted Y. He is soon however roused from the state surly to the
state frantick, and then follow raving, yelling, cursing, she
fainting, he relenting, in runs Imogine's child, squeaks "mother!" He
snatches it up, and with a "God bless thee, child! Bertram has kissed
thy child,"—the curtain drops. The third act is short, and short be
our account of it. It introduces Lord St. Aldobrand on his road
homeward, and next Imogine in the convent, confessing the foulness of
her heart to the Prior, who first indulges his old humour with a fit
of senseless scolding, then leaves her alone with her ruffian
paramour, with whom she makes at once an infamous appointment, and the
curtain drops, that it may be carried into act and consummation.
I want words to describe the mingled horror and disgust with which I
witnessed the opening of the fourth act, considering it as a
melancholy proof of the depravation of the public mind. The shocking
spirit of jacobinism seemed no longer confined to politics. The
familiarity with atrocious events and characters appeared to have
poisoned the taste, even where it had not directly disorganized the
moral principles, and left the feelings callous to all the mild
appeals, and craving alone for the grossest and most outrageous
stimulants. The very fact then present to our senses, that a British
audience could remain passive under such an insult to common decency,
nay, receive with a thunder of applause, a human being supposed to
have come reeking from the consummation of this complex foulness and
baseness, these and the like reflections so pressed as with the weight
of lead upon my heart, that actor, author, and tragedy would have been
forgotten, had it not been for a plain elderly man sitting beside me,
who, with a very serious face, that at once expressed surprise and
aversion, touched my elbow, and, pointing to the actor, said to me in
a half-whisper—"Do you see that little fellow there? he has just been
committing adultery!" Somewhat relieved by the laugh which this droll
address occasioned, I forced back my attention to the stage
sufficiently to learn, that Bertram is recovered from a transient fit
of remorse by the information, that St. Aldobrand was commissioned (to
do, what every honest man must have done without commission, if he did
his duty) to seize him and deliver him to the just vengeance of the
law; an information which, (as he had long known himself to be an
attainted traitor and proclaimed outlaw, and not only a trader in
blood himself, but notoriously the Captain of a gang of thieves,
pirates, and assassins), assuredly could not have been new to him. It
is this, however, which alone and instantly restores him to his
accustomed state of raving, blasphemy, and nonsense. Next follows
Imogine's constrained interview with her injured husband, and his
sudden departure again, all in love and kindness, in order to attend
the feast of St. Anselm at the convent. This was, it must be owned, a
very strange engagement for so tender a husband to make within a few
minutes after so long an absence. But first his lady has told him that
she has "a vow on her," and wishes "that black perdition may gulf her
perjured soul,"—(Note: she is lying at the very time)—if she ascends
his bed, till her penance is accomplished. How, therefore, is the poor
husband to amuse himself in this interval of her penance? But do not
be distressed, reader, on account of the St. Aldobrand's absence! As
the author has contrived to send him out of the house, when a husband
would be in his, and the lover's way, so he will doubtless not be at a
loss to bring him back again as soon as he is wanted. Well! the
husband gone in on the one side, out pops the lover from the other,
and for the fiendish purpose of harrowing up the soul of his wretched
accomplice in guilt, by announcing to her, with most brutal and
blasphemous execrations, his fixed and deliberate resolve to
assassinate her husband; all this too is for no discoverable purpose
on the part of the author, but that of introducing a series of super-
tragic starts, pauses, screams, struggling, dagger-throwing, falling
on the ground, starting up again wildly, swearing, outcries for help,
falling again on the ground, rising again, faintly tottering towards
the door, and, to end the scene, a most convenient fainting fit of our
lady's, just in time to give Bertram an opportunity of seeking the
object of his hatred, before she alarms the house, which indeed she
has had full time to have done before, but that the author rather
chose she should amuse herself and the audience by the above-described
ravings and startings. She recovers slowly, and to her enter,
Clotilda, the confidante and mother confessor; then commences, what in
theatrical language is called the madness, but which the author more
accurately entitles, delirium, it appearing indeed a sort of
intermittent fever with fits of lightheadedness off and on, whenever
occasion and stage effect happen to call for it. A convenient return
of the storm, (we told the reader before-hand how it would be), had
changed—
"The rivulet, that bathed the convent walls,
Into a foaming flood: upon its brink
The Lord and his small train do stand appalled.
With torch and bell from their high battlements
The monks do summon to the pass in vain;
He must return to-night."
Talk of the Devil, and his horns appear, says the proverb and sure
enough, within ten lines of the exit of the messenger, sent to stop
him, the arrival of Lord St. Aldobrand is announced. Bertram's ruffian
band now enter, and range themselves across the stage, giving fresh
cause for Imogine's screams and madness. St. Aldobrand, having
received his mortal wound behind the scenes, totters in to welter in
his blood, and to die at the feet of this double-damned adultress.
Of her, as far as she is concerned in this fourth act, we have two
additional points to notice: first, the low cunning and Jesuitical
trick with which she deludes her husband into words of forgiveness,
which he himself does not understand; and secondly, that everywhere
she is made the object of interest and sympathy, and it is not the
author's fault, if, at any moment, she excites feelings less gentle,
than those we are accustomed to associate with the self-accusations of
a sincere religious penitent. And did a British audience endure all
this?—They received it with plaudits, which, but for the rivalry of
the carts and hackney coaches, might have disturbed the evening-
prayers of the scanty week day congregation at St. Paul's cathedral.
Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.
Of the fifth act, the only thing noticeable, (for rant and nonsense,
though abundant as ever, have long before the last act become things
of course,) is the profane representation of the high altar in a
chapel, with all the vessels and other preparations for the holy
sacrament. A hymn is actually sung on the stage by the chorister boys!
For the rest, Imogine, who now and then talks deliriously, but who is
always light-headed as far as her gown and hair can make her so,
wanders about in dark woods with cavern-rocks and precipices in the
back-scene; and a number of mute dramatis personae move in and out
continually, for whose presence, there is always at least this reason,
that they afford something to be seen, by that very large part of a
Drury Lane audience who have small chance of hearing a word. She had,
it appears, taken her child with her, but what becomes of the child,
whether she murdered it or not, nobody can tell, nobody can learn; it
was a riddle at the representation, and after a most attentive perusal
of the Play, a riddle it remains.
"No more I know, I wish I did,
And I would tell it all to you;
For what became of this poor child
There's none that ever knew."
Our whole information [84] is derived from the following words—
"PRIOR.—Where is thy child?
CLOTIL.—(Pointing to the cavern into which she has looked)
Oh he lies cold within his cavern-tomb!
Why dost thou urge her with the horrid theme?
PRIOR.—(who will not, the reader may observe, be disappointed of
his dose of scolding)
It was to make (query wake) one living cord o' th' heart,
And I will try, tho' my own breaks at it.
Where is thy child?
IMOG.—(with a frantic laugh) The forest fiend hath snatched him—
He (who? the fiend or the child?) rides the night-mare thro' the
wizard woods."
Now these two lines consist in a senseless plagiarism from the
counterfeited madness of Edgar in Lear, who, in imitation of the gypsy
incantations, puns on the old word mair, a hag; and the no less
senseless adoption of Dryden's forest fiend, and the wisard stream by
which Milton, in his Lycidas, so finely characterizes the spreading
Deva, fabulosus amnis. Observe too these images stand unique in the
speeches of Imogine, without the slightest resemblance to anything she
says before or after. But we are weary. The characters in this act
frisk about, here, there, and every where, as teasingly as the Jack o'
Lantern-lights which mischievous boys, from across a narrow street,
throw with a looking-glass on the faces of their opposite neighbours.
Bertram disarmed, outheroding Charles de Moor in the Robbers, befaces
the collected knights of St. Anselm, (all in complete armour) and so,
by pure dint of black looks, he outdares them into passive poltroons.
The sudden revolution in the Prior's manners we have before noticed,
and it is indeed so outre, that a number of the audience imagined a
great secret was to come out, viz.: that the Prior was one of the many
instances of a youthful sinner metamorphosed into an old scold, and
that this Bertram would appear at last to be his son. Imogine re-
appears at the convent, and dies of her own accord. Bertram stabs
himself, and dies by her side, and that the play may conclude as it
began, to wit, in a superfetation of blasphemy upon nonsense, because
he had snatched a sword from a despicable coward, who retreats in
terror when it is pointed towards him in sport; this felo de se, and
thief-captain—this loathsome and leprous confluence of robbery,
adultery, murder, and cowardly assassination,—this monster, whose
best deed is, the having saved his betters from the degradation of
hanging him, by turning Jack Ketch to himself; first recommends the
charitable Monks and holy Prior to pray for his soul, and then has the
folly and impudence to exclaim—
"I die no felon's death,
A warriour's weapon freed a warriour's soul!"

[Here ends chapter 23.  To read other chapters of
Biographia Literaria, click here.]

* * * * * * * *

Footnotes by Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

[79] Praecludere calumniam, in the original.
[80] Better thus: Forma specifica per formam individualem translucens:
or better yet--Species individualisata, sive Individuum cuilibet
Speciei determinatae in omni parte correspondens et quasi versione
quadam eam interpretans et repetens.
[81] ------"The big round tears
Cours'd one another down his innocent nose
In piteous chase,"
says Shakespeare of a wounded stag hanging its head over a stream:
naturally, from the position of the head, and most beautifully, from
the association of the preceding image, of the chase, in which "the
poor sequester'd stag from the hunter's aim had ta'en a hurt." In the
supposed position of Bertram, the metaphor, if not false, loses all
the propriety of the original.
[82] Among a number of other instances of words chosen without reason,
Imogine in the first act declares, that thunder-storms were not able
to intercept her prayers for "the desperate man, in desperate ways who
dealt"----
"Yea, when the launched bolt did sear her sense,
Her soul's deep orisons were breathed for him;"
that is, when a red-hot bolt, launched at her from a thunder-cloud,
had cauterized her sense, to plain English, burnt her eyes out of her
head, she kept still praying on.
"Was not this love? Yea, thus doth woman love!"
[83] This sort of repetition is one of this writers peculiarities, and
there is scarce a page which does not furnish one or more instances--
Ex. gr. in the first page or two. Act I, line 7th, "and deemed that I
might sleep."--Line 10, "Did rock and quiver in the bickering glare."
--Lines 14, 15, 16, "But by the momently gleams of sheeted blue, Did
the pale marbles dare so sternly on me, I almost deemed they lived."--
Line 37, "The glare of Hell."--Line 35, "O holy Prior, this is no
earthly storm."--Line 38, "This is no earthly storm."--Line 42,
"Dealing with us."--Line 43, "Deal thus sternly:"--Line 44, "Speak!
thou hast something seen?"--"A fearful sight!"--Line 45, "What hast
thou seen! A piteous, fearful sight."--Line 48, "quivering gleams."--
Line 50, "In the hollow pauses of the storm."--Line 61, "The pauses of
the storm, etc."
[84] The child is an important personage, for I see not by what
possible means the author could have ended the second and third acts
but for its timely appearance. How ungrateful then not further to
notice its fate!
[85] Classically too, as far as consists with the allegorizing fancy
of the modern, that still striving to project the inward,
contradistinguishes itself from the seeming ease with which the poetry
of the ancients reflects the world without. Casimir affords, perhaps,
the most striking instance of this characteristic difference.--For his
style and diction are really classical: while Cowley, who resembles
Casimir in many respects, completely barbarizes his Latinity, and even
his metre, by the heterogeneous nature of his thoughts. That Dr.
Johnson should have passed a contrary judgment, and have even
preferred Cowley's Latin Poems to Milton's, is a caprice that has, if I
mistake not, excited the surprise of all scholars. I was much amused
last summer with the laughable affright, with which an Italian poet
perused a page of Cowley's Davideis, contrasted with the enthusiasm
with which he first ran through, and then read aloud, Milton's Mansus
and Ad Patrem.
[86] Flectit, or if the metre had allowed, premit would have supported
the metaphor better.
[87] Poor unlucky Metaphysicks! and what are they? A single sentence
expresses the object and thereby the contents of this science. Gnothi
seauton:
Nosce te ipsum,
Tuque Deum, quantum licet, inque Deo omnia noscas.
Know thyself: and so shalt thou know God, as far as is permitted to a
creature, and in God all things.--Surely, there is a strange--nay,
rather too natural--aversion to many to know themselves.

  

Biographia Literaria – Chapter XXII (by Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

11 Friday Jun 2010

Posted by Crisis Chronicles Press in 1800s, Autobiography, British, Coleridge (Samuel T), Philosophy, Writing

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coleridge

Biographia
Literaria

by
Samuel
Taylor
Coleridge

Chapter XXII [of
XXIV]

[To read other chapters, click here.]
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.

If Mr. Wordsworth have set forth principles of poetry which his
arguments are insufficient to support, let him and those who have
adopted his sentiments be set right by the confutation of those
arguments, and by the substitution of more philosophical principles.
And still let the due credit be given to the portion and importance of
the truths, which are blended with his theory; truths, the too
exclusive attention to which had occasioned its errors, by tempting
him to carry those truths beyond their proper limits. If his mistaken
theory have at all influenced his poetic compositions, let the effects
be pointed out, and the instances given. But let it likewise be shown,
how far the influence has acted; whether diffusively, or only by
starts; whether the number and importance of the poems and passages
thus infected be great or trifling compared with the sound portion;
and lastly, whether they are inwoven into the texture of his works, or
are loose and separable. The result of such a trial would evince
beyond a doubt, what it is high time to announce decisively and aloud,
that the supposed characteristics of Mr. Wordsworth's poetry, whether
admired or reprobated; whether they are simplicity or simpleness;
faithful adherence to essential nature, or wilful selections from
human nature of its meanest forms and under the least attractive
associations; are as little the real characteristics of his poetry at
large, as of his genius and the constitution of his mind.
In a comparatively small number of poems he chose to try an
experiment; and this experiment we will suppose to have failed. Yet
even in these poems it is impossible not to perceive that the natural
tendency of the poet's mind is to great objects and elevated
conceptions. The poem entitled FIDELITY is for the greater part
written in language, as unraised and naked as any perhaps in the two
volumes. Yet take the following stanza and compare it with the
preceding stanzas of the same poem.
"There sometimes doth a leaping fish
Send through the tarn a lonely cheer;
The crags repeat the raven's croak,
In symphony austere;
Thither the rainbow comes--the cloud--
And mists that spread the flying shroud;
And sun-beams; and the sounding blast,
That, if it could, would hurry past;
But that enormous barrier holds it fast."
Or compare the four last lines of the concluding stanza with the
former half.
"Yes, proof was plain that, since the day
On which the Traveller thus had died,
The Dog had watched about the spot,
Or by his Master's side:
How nourish'd here through such long time
He knows, who gave that love sublime,--
And gave that strength of feeling, great
Above all human estimate!"
Can any candid and intelligent mind hesitate in determining, which of
these best represents the tendency and native character of the poet's
genius? Will he not decide that the one was written because the poet
would so write, and the other because he could not so entirely repress
the force and grandeur of his mind, but that he must in some part or
other of every composition write otherwise? In short, that his only
disease is the being out of his element; like the swan, that, having
amused himself, for a while, with crushing the weeds on the river's
bank, soon returns to his own majestic movements on its reflecting and
sustaining surface. Let it be observed that I am here supposing the
imagined judge, to whom I appeal, to have already decided against the
poet's theory, as far as it is different from the principles of the
art, generally acknowledged.
I cannot here enter into a detailed examination of Mr. Wordsworth's
works; but I will attempt to give the main results of my own judgment,
after an acquaintance of many years, and repeated perusals. And
though, to appreciate the defects of a great mind it is necessary to
understand previously its characteristic excellences, yet I have
already expressed myself with sufficient fulness, to preclude most of
the ill effects that might arise from my pursuing a contrary
arrangement. I will therefore commence with what I deem the prominent
defects of his poems hitherto published.
The first characteristic, though only occasional defect, which I
appear to myself to find in these poems is the inconstancy of the
style. Under this name I refer to the sudden and unprepared
transitions from lines or sentences of peculiar felicity--(at all
events striking and original)--to a style, not only unimpassioned but
undistinguished. He sinks too often and too abruptly to that style,
which I should place in the second division of language, dividing it
into the three species; first, that which is peculiar to poetry;
second, that which is only proper in prose; and third, the neutral or
common to both. There have been works, such as Cowley's Essay on
Cromwell, in which prose and verse are intermixed (not as in the
Consolation of Boetius, or the ARGENIS of Barclay, by the insertion of
poems supposed to have been spoken or composed on occasions previously
related in prose, but) the poet passing from one to the other, as the
nature of the thoughts or his own feelings dictated. Yet this mode of
composition does not satisfy a cultivated taste. There is something
unpleasant in the being thus obliged to alternate states of feeling so
dissimilar, and this too in a species of writing, the pleasure from
which is in part derived from the preparation and previous expectation
of the reader. A portion of that awkwardness is felt which hangs upon
the introduction of songs in our modern comic operas; and to prevent
which the judicious Metastasio (as to whose exquisite taste there can
be no hesitation, whatever doubts may be entertained as to his poetic
genius) uniformly placed the aria at the end of the scene, at the same
time that he almost always raises and impassions the style of the
recitative immediately preceding. Even in real life, the difference is
great and evident between words used as the arbitrary marks of
thought, our smooth market-coin of intercourse, with the image and
superscription worn out by currency; and those which convey pictures
either borrowed from one outward object to enliven and particularize
some other; or used allegorically to body forth the inward state of
the person speaking; or such as are at least the exponents of his
peculiar turn and unusual extent of faculty. So much so indeed, that
in the social circles of private life we often find a striking use of
the latter put a stop to the general flow of conversation, and by the
excitement arising from concentred attention produce a sort of damp
and interruption for some minutes after. But in the perusal of works
of literary art, we prepare ourselves for such language; and the
business of the writer, like that of a painter whose subject requires
unusual splendour and prominence, is so to raise the lower and neutral
tints, that what in a different style would be the commanding colours,
are here used as the means of that gentle degradation requisite in
order to produce the effect of a whole. Where this is not achieved in
a poem, the metre merely reminds the reader of his claims in order to
disappoint them; and where this defect occurs frequently, his feelings
are alternately startled by anticlimax and hyperclimax.
I refer the reader to the exquisite stanzas cited for another purpose
from THE BLIND HIGHLAND BOY; and then annex, as being in my opinion
instances of this disharmony in style, the two following:
"And one, the rarest, was a shell,
Which he, poor child, had studied well:
The shell of a green turtle, thin
And hollow;--you might sit therein,
It was so wide, and deep."
"Our Highland Boy oft visited
The house which held this prize; and, led
By choice or chance, did thither come
One day, when no one was at home,
And found the door unbarred."
Or page 172, vol. I.
"'Tis gone forgotten, let me do
My best. There was a smile or two--
I can remember them, I see
The smiles worth all the world to me.
Dear Baby! I must lay thee down:
Thou troublest me with strange alarms;
Smiles hast thou, sweet ones of thine own;
I cannot keep thee in my arms;
For they confound me: as it is,
I have forgot those smiles of his!"
Or page 269, vol. I.
"Thou hast a nest, for thy love and thy rest
And though little troubled with sloth
Drunken lark! thou would'st be loth
To be such a traveller as I.
Happy, happy liver!
_With a soul as strong as a mountain river
Pouring out praise to th' Almighty giver,_
Joy and jollity be with us both!
Hearing thee or else some other,
As merry a brother
I on the earth will go plodding on
By myself cheerfully till the day is done."
The incongruity, which I appear to find in this passage, is that of
the two noble lines in italics with the preceding and following. So
vol. II. page 30.
"Close by a Pond, upon the further side,
He stood alone; a minute's space I guess,
I watch'd him, he continuing motionless
To the Pool's further margin then I drew;
He being all the while before me full in view."
Compare this with the repetition of the same image, the next stanza
but two.
"And, still as I drew near with gentle pace,
Beside the little pond or moorish flood
Motionless as a Cloud the Old Man stood,
That heareth not the loud winds when they call;
And moveth altogether, if it move at all."
Or lastly, the second of the three following stanzas, compared both
with the first and the third.
"My former thoughts returned; the fear that kills;
And hope that is unwilling to be fed;
Cold, pain, and labour, and all fleshly ills;
And mighty Poets in their misery dead.
But now, perplex'd by what the Old Man had said,
My question eagerly did I renew,
'How is it that you live, and what is it you do?'
"He with a smile did then his words repeat;
And said, that gathering Leeches far and wide
He travell'd; stirring thus about his feet
The waters of the Ponds where they abide.
`Once I could meet with them on every side;
'But they have dwindled long by slow decay;
'Yet still I persevere, and find them where I may.'
While he was talking thus, the lonely place,
The Old Man's shape, and speech, all troubled me
In my mind's eye I seemed to see him pace
About the weary moors continually,
Wandering about alone and silently."
Indeed this fine poem is especially characteristic of the author.
There is scarce a defect or excellence in his writings of which it
would not present a specimen. But it would be unjust not to repeat
that this defect is only occasional. From a careful reperusal of the
two volumes of poems, I doubt whether the objectionable passages would
amount in the whole to one hundred lines; not the eighth part of the
number of pages. In THE EXCURSION the feeling of incongruity is seldom
excited by the diction of any passage considered in itself, but by the
sudden superiority of some other passage forming the context.
The second defect I can generalize with tolerable accuracy, if the
reader will pardon an uncouth and new-coined word. There is, I should
say, not seldom a matter-of-factness in certain poems. This may be
divided into, first, a laborious minuteness and fidelity in the
representation of objects, and their positions, as they appeared to
the poet himself; secondly, the insertion of accidental circumstances,
in order to the full explanation of his living characters, their
dispositions and actions; which circumstances might be necessary to
establish the probability of a statement in real life, where nothing
is taken for granted by the hearer; but appear superfluous in poetry,
where the reader is willing to believe for his own sake. To this
actidentality I object, as contravening the essence of poetry, which
Aristotle pronounces to be spoudaiotaton kai philosophotaton genos,
the most intense, weighty and philosophical product of human art;
adding, as the reason, that it is the most catholic and abstract. The
following passage from Davenant's prefatory letter to Hobbes well
expresses this truth. "When I considered the actions which I meant to
describe; (those inferring the persons), I was again persuaded rather
to choose those of a former age, than the present; and in a century so
far removed, as might preserve me from their improper examinations,
who know not the requisites of a poem, nor how much pleasure they
lose, (and even the pleasures of heroic poesy are not unprofitable),
who take away the liberty of a poet, and fetter his feet in the
shackles of an historian. For why should a poet doubt in story to mend
the intrigues of fortune by more delightful conveyances of probable
fictions, because austere historians have entered into bond to truth?
An obligation, which were in poets as foolish and unnecessary, as is
the bondage of false martyrs, who lie in chains for a mistaken
opinion. But by this I would imply, that truth, narrative and past, is
the idol of historians, (who worship a dead thing), and truth
operative, and by effects continually alive, is the mistress of poets,
who hath not her existence in matter, but in reason."
For this minute accuracy in the painting of local imagery, the lines
in THE EXCURSION, pp. 96, 97, and 98, may be taken, if not as a
striking instance, yet as an illustration of my meaning. It must be
some strong motive--(as, for instance, that the description was
necessary to the intelligibility of the tale)--which could induce me
to describe in a number of verses what a draughtsman could present to
the eye with incomparably greater satisfaction by half a dozen strokes
of his pencil, or the painter with as many touches of his brush. Such
descriptions too often occasion in the mind of a reader, who is
determined to understand his author, a feeling of labour, not very
dissimilar to that, with which he would construct a diagram, line by
line, for a long geometrical proposition. It seems to be like taking
the pieces of a dissected map out of its box. We first look at one
part, and then at another, then join and dove-tail them; and when the
successive acts of attention have been completed, there is a
retrogressive effort of mind to behold it as a whole. The poet should
paint to the imagination, not to the fancy; and I know no happier case
to exemplify the distinction between these two faculties. Master-
pieces of the former mode of poetic painting abound in the writings of
Milton, for example:
"The fig-tree; not that kind for fruit renown'd,
"But such as at this day, to Indians known,
"In Malabar or Decan spreads her arms
"Branching so broad and long, that in the ground
"The bended twigs take root, and daughters grow
"About the mother tree, a pillar'd shade
"High over-arch'd and ECHOING WALKS BETWEEN;
"There oft the Indian herdsman, shunning heat,
"Shelters in cool, and tends his pasturing herds
"At hoop-holes cut through thickest shade."
This is creation rather than painting, or if painting, yet such, and
with such co-presence of the whole picture flashed at once upon the
eye, as the sun paints in a camera obscura. But the poet must likewise
understand and command what Bacon calls the vestigia communia of the
senses, the latency of all in each, and more especially as by a
magical penny duplex, the excitement of vision by sound and the
exponents of sound. Thus, "The echoing walks between," may be almost
said to reverse the fable in tradition of the head of Memnon, in the
Egyptian statue. Such may be deservedly entitled the creative words in
the world of imagination.
The second division respects an apparent minute adherence to matter-
of-fact in character and Incidents; a biographical attention to
probability, and an anxiety of explanation and retrospect. Under this
head I shall deliver, with no feigned diffidence, the results of my
best reflection on the great point of controversy between Mr.
Wordsworth and his objectors; namely, on the choice of his characters.
I have already declared, and, I trust justified, my utter dissent from
the mode of argument which his critics have hitherto employed. To
their question, "Why did you choose such a character, or a character
from such a rank of life?"--the poet might in my opinion fairly
retort: why with the conception of my character did you make wilful
choice of mean or ludicrous associations not furnished by me, but
supplied from your own sickly and fastidious feelings? How was it,
indeed, probable, that such arguments could have any weight with an
author, whose plan, whose guiding principle, and main object it was to
attack and subdue that state of association, which leads us to place
the chief value on those things on which man differs from man, and to
forget or disregard the high dignities, which belong to Human Nature,
the sense and the feeling, which may be, and ought to be, found in all
ranks? The feelings with which, as Christians, we contemplate a mixed
congregation rising or kneeling before their common Maker, Mr.
Wordsworth would have us entertain at all times, as men, and as
readers; and by the excitement of this lofty, yet prideless
impartiality in poetry, he might hope to have encouraged its
continuance in real life. The praise of good men be his! In real life,
and, I trust, even in my imagination, I honour a virtuous and wise
man, without reference to the presence or absence of artificial
advantages. Whether in the person of an armed baron, a laurelled bard,
or of an old Pedlar, or still older Leech-gatherer, the same qualities
of head and heart must claim the same reverence. And even in poetry I
am not conscious, that I have ever suffered my feelings to be
disturbed or offended by any thoughts or images, which the poet
himself has not presented.
But yet I object, nevertheless, and for the following reasons. First,
because the object in view, as an immediate object, belongs to the
moral philosopher, and would be pursued, not only more appropriately,
but in my opinion with far greater probability of success, in sermons
or moral essays, than in an elevated poem. It seems, indeed, to
destroy the main fundamental distinction, not only between a poem and
prose, but even between philosophy and works of fiction, inasmuch as
it proposes truth for its immediate object, instead of pleasure. Now
till the blessed time shall come, when truth itself shall be pleasure,
and both shall be so united, as to be distinguishable in words only,
not in feeling, it will remain the poet's office to proceed upon that
state of association, which actually exists as general; instead of
attempting first to make it what it ought to be, and then to let the
pleasure follow. But here is unfortunately a small hysteron-proteron.
For the communication of pleasure is the introductory means by which
alone the poet must expect to moralize his readers. Secondly: though I
were to admit, for a moment, this argument to be groundless: yet how
is the moral effect to be produced, by merely attaching the name of
some low profession to powers which are least likely, and to qualities
which are assuredly not more likely, to be found in it? The Poet,
speaking in his own person, may at once delight and improve us by
sentiments, which teach us the independence of goodness, of wisdom,
and even of genius, on the favours of fortune. And having made a due
reverence before the throne of Antonine, he may bow with equal awe
before Epictetus among his fellow-slaves
------"and rejoice
In the plain presence of his dignity."
Who is not at once delighted and improved, when the Poet Wordsworth
himself exclaims,
"Oh! many are the Poets that are sown
By Nature; men endowed with highest gifts
The vision and the faculty divine,
Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse,
Nor having e'er, as life advanced, been led
By circumstance to take unto the height
The measure of themselves, these favoured Beings,
All but a scattered few, live out their time,
Husbanding that which they possess within,
And go to the grave, unthought of. Strongest minds
Are often those of whom the noisy world
Hears least."
To use a colloquial phrase, such sentiments, in such language, do
one's heart good; though I for my part, have not the fullest faith in
the truth of the observation. On the contrary I believe the instances
to be exceedingly rare; and should feel almost as strong an objection
to introduce such a character in a poetic fiction, as a pair of black
swans on a lake, in a fancy landscape. When I think how many, and how
much better books than Homer, or even than Herodotus, Pindar or
Aeschylus, could have read, are in the power of almost every man, in a
country where almost every man is instructed to read and write; and
how restless, how difficultly hidden, the powers of genius are; and
yet find even in situations the most favourable, according to Mr.
Wordsworth, for the formation of a pure and poetic language; in
situations which ensure familiarity with the grandest objects of the
imagination; but one Burns, among the shepherds of Scotland, and not a
single poet of humble life among those of English lakes and mountains;
I conclude, that Poetic Genius is not only a very delicate but a very
rare plant.
But be this as it may, the feelings with which,
"I think of Chatterton, the marvellous Boy,
The sleepless Soul, that perished in his pride;
Of Burns, who walk'd in glory and in joy
Behind his plough, upon the mountain-side"--
are widely different from those with which I should read a poem, where
the author, having occasion for the character of a poet and a
philosopher in the fable of his narration, had chosen to make him a
chimney-sweeper; and then, in order to remove all doubts on the
subject, had invented an account of his birth, parentage and
education, with all the strange and fortunate accidents which had
concurred in making him at once poet, philosopher, and sweep! Nothing,
but biography, can justify this. If it be admissible even in a novel,
it must be one in the manner of De Foe's, that were meant to pass for
histories, not in the manner of Fielding's: In THE LIFE OF MOLL
FLANDERS, Or COLONEL JACK, not in a TOM JONES, or even a JOSEPH
ANDREWS. Much less then can it be legitimately introduced in a poem,
the characters of which, amid the strongest individualization, must
still remain representative. The precepts of Horace, on this point,
are grounded on the nature both of poetry and of the human mind. They
are not more peremptory, than wise and prudent. For in the first place
a deviation from them perplexes the reader's feelings, and all the
circumstances which are feigned in order to make such accidents less
improbable, divide and disquiet his faith, rather than aid and support
it. Spite of all attempts, the fiction will appear, and unfortunately
not as fictitious but as false. The reader not only knows, that the
sentiments and language are the poet's own, and his own too in his
artificial character, as poet; but by the fruitless endeavours to make
him think the contrary, he is not even suffered to forget it. The
effect is similar to that produced by an Epic Poet, when the fable
and the characters are derived from Scripture history, as in THE
MESSIAH of Klopstock, or in CUMBERLAND'S CALVARY; and not merely
suggested by it as in the PARADISE LOST of Milton. That illusion,
contradistinguished from delusion, that negative faith, which simply
permits the images presented to work by their own force, without
either denial or affirmation of their real existence by the judgment,
is rendered impossible by their immediate neighbourhood to words and
facts of known and absolute truth. A faith, which transcends even
historic belief, must absolutely put out this mere poetic analogon of
faith, as the summer sun is said to extinguish our household fires,
when it shines full upon them. What would otherwise have been yielded
to as pleasing fiction, is repelled as revolting falsehood. The effect
produced in this latter case by the solemn belief of the reader, is in
a less degree brought about in the instances, to which I have been
objecting, by the balked attempts of the author to make him believe.
Add to all the foregoing the seeming uselessness both of the project
and of the anecdotes from which it is to derive support. Is there one
word, for instance, attributed to the pedlar in THE EXCURSION,
characteristic of a Pedlar? One sentiment, that might not more
plausibly, even without the aid of any previous explanation, have
proceeded from any wise and beneficent old man, of a rank or
profession in which the language of learning and refinement are
natural and to be expected? Need the rank have been at all
particularized, where nothing follows which the knowledge of that rank
is to explain or illustrate? When on the contrary this information
renders the man's language, feelings, sentiments, and information a
riddle, which must itself be solved by episodes of anecdote? Finally
when this, and this alone, could have induced a genuine Poet to
inweave in a poem of the loftiest style, and on subjects the loftiest
and of most universal interest, such minute matters of fact, (not
unlike those furnished for the obituary of a magazine by the friends
of some obscure "ornament of society lately deceased" in some obscure
town,) as
"Among the hills of Athol he was born
There, on a small hereditary Farm,
An unproductive slip of rugged ground,
His Father dwelt; and died in poverty;
While He, whose lowly fortune I retrace,
The youngest of three sons, was yet a babe,
A little One--unconscious of their loss.
But ere he had outgrown his infant days
His widowed Mother, for a second Mate,
Espoused the teacher of the Village School;
Who on her offspring zealously bestowed
Needful instruction."
"From his sixth year, the Boy of whom I speak,
In summer tended cattle on the Hills;
But, through the inclement and the perilous days
Of long-continuing winter, he repaired
To his Step-father's School,"-etc.
For all the admirable passages interposed in this narration, might,
with trifling alterations, have been far more appropriately, and with
far greater verisimilitude, told of a poet in the character of a poet;
and without incurring another defect which I shall now mention, and a
sufficient illustration of which will have been here anticipated.
Third; an undue predilection for the dramatic form in certain poems,
from which one or other of two evils result. Either the thoughts and
diction are different from that of the poet, and then there arises an
incongruity of style; or they are the same and indistinguishable, and
then it presents a species of ventriloquism, where two are represented
as talking, while in truth one man only speaks.
The fourth class of defects is closely connected with the former; but
yet are such as arise likewise from an intensity of feeling
disproportionate to such knowledge and value of the objects described,
as can be fairly anticipated of men in general, even of the most
cultivated classes; and with which therefore few only, and those few
particularly circumstanced, can be supposed to sympathize: In this
class, I comprise occasional prolixity, repetition, and an eddying,
instead of progression, of thought. As instances, see pages 27, 28,
and 62 of the Poems, vol. I. and the first eighty lines of the VIth
Book of THE EXCURSION.
Fifth and last; thoughts and images too great for the subject. This is
an approximation to what might be called mental bombast, as
distinguished from verbal: for, as in the latter there is a
disproportion of the expressions to the thoughts so in this there is a
disproportion of thought to the circumstance and occasion. This, by
the bye, is a fault of which none but a man of genius is capable. It
is the awkwardness and strength of Hercules with the distaff of
Omphale.
It is a well-known fact, that bright colours in motion both make and
leave the strongest impressions on the eye. Nothing is more likely
too, than that a vivid image or visual spectrum, thus originated, may
become the link of association in recalling the feelings and images
that had accompanied the original impression. But if we describe this
in such lines, as
"They flash upon that inward eye,
Which is the bliss of solitude!"
in what words shall we describe the joy of retrospection, when the
images and virtuous actions of a whole well-spent life, pass before
that conscience which is indeed the inward eye: which is indeed "the
bliss of solitude?" Assuredly we seem to sink most abruptly, not to
say burlesquely, and almost as in a medley, from this couplet to--
"And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils."    Vol. I. p. 328.
The second instance is from vol. II. page 12, where the poet having
gone out for a day's tour of pleasure, meets early in the morning with
a knot of Gipsies, who had pitched their blanket-tents and straw-beds,
together with their children and asses, in some field by the road-
side. At the close of the day on his return our tourist found them in
the same place. "Twelve hours," says he,
"Twelve hours, twelve bounteous hours are gone, while I
Have been a traveller under open sky,
Much witnessing of change and cheer,
Yet as I left I find them here!"
Whereat the poet, without seeming to reflect that the poor tawny
wanderers might probably have been tramping for weeks together through
road and lane, over moor and mountain, and consequently must have been
right glad to rest themselves, their children and cattle, for one
whole day; and overlooking the obvious truth, that such repose might
be quite as necessary for them, as a walk of the same continuance was
pleasing or healthful for the more fortunate poet; expresses his
indignation in a series of lines, the diction and imagery of which
would have been rather above, than below the mark, had they been
applied to the immense empire of China improgressive for thirty
centuries:
"The weary Sun betook himself to rest:--
--Then issued Vesper from the fulgent west,
Outshining, like a visible God,
The glorious path in which he trod.
And now, ascending, after one dark hour,
And one night's diminution of her power,
Behold the mighty Moon! this way
She looks, as if at them--but they
Regard not her:--oh, better wrong and strife,
Better vain deeds or evil than such life!
The silent Heavens have goings on
The stars have tasks!--but these have none!"
The last instance of this defect,(for I know no other than these
already cited) is from the Ode, page 351, vol. II., where, speaking of
a child, "a six years' Darling of a pigmy size," he thus addresses
him:
"Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep
Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind,
That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep,
Haunted for ever by the Eternal Mind,--
Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!
On whom those truths do rest,
Which we are toiling all our lives to find!
Thou, over whom thy Immortality
Broods like the Day, a Master o'er a Slave,
A Present which is not to be put by!"
Now here, not to stop at the daring spirit of metaphor which connects
the epithets "deaf and silent," with the apostrophized eye: or (if we
are to refer it to the preceding word, "Philosopher"), the faulty and
equivocal syntax of the passage; and without examining the propriety
of making a "Master brood o'er a Slave," or "the Day" brood at all; we
will merely ask, what does all this mean? In what sense is a child of
that age a Philosopher? In what sense does he read "the eternal deep?"
In what sense is he declared to be "for ever haunted" by the Supreme
Being? or so inspired as to deserve the splendid titles of a Mighty
Prophet, a blessed Seer? By reflection? by knowledge? by conscious
intuition? or by any form or modification of consciousness? These
would be tidings indeed; but such as would pre-suppose an immediate
revelation to the inspired communicator, and require miracles to
authenticate his inspiration. Children at this age give us no such
information of themselves; and at what time were we dipped in the
Lethe, which has produced such utter oblivion of a state so godlike?
There are many of us that still possess some remembrances, more or
less distinct, respecting themselves at six years old; pity that the
worthless straws only should float, while treasures, compared with
which all the mines of Golconda and Mexico were but straws, should be
absorbed by some unknown gulf into some unknown abyss.
But if this be too wild and exorbitant to be suspected as having been
the poet's meaning; if these mysterious gifts, faculties, and
operations, are not accompanied with consciousness; who else is
conscious of them? or how can it be called the child, if it be no part
of the child's conscious being? For aught I know, the thinking Spirit
within me may be substantially one with the principle of life, and of
vital operation. For aught I know, it might be employed as a secondary
agent in the marvellous organization and organic movements of my body.
But, surely, it would be strange language to say, that I construct my
heart! or that I propel the finer influences through my nerves! or
that I compress my brain, and draw the curtains of sleep round my own
eyes! Spinoza and Behmen were, on different systems, both Pantheists;
and among the ancients there were philosophers, teachers of the EN KAI
PAN, who not only taught that God was All, but that this All
constituted God. Yet not even these would confound the part, as a
part, with the whole, as the whole. Nay, in no system is the
distinction between the individual and God, between the Modification,
and the one only Substance, more sharply drawn, than in that of
Spinoza. Jacobi indeed relates of Lessing, that, after a conversation
with him at the house of the Poet, Gleim, (the Tyrtaeus and Anacreon
of the German Parnassus,) in which conversation Lessing had avowed
privately to Jacobi his reluctance to admit any personal existence of
the Supreme Being, or the possibility of personality except in a
finite Intellect, and while they were sitting at table, a shower of
rain came on unexpectedly. Gleim expressed his regret at the
circumstance, because they had meant to drink their wine in the
garden: upon which Lessing in one of his half-earnest, half-joking
moods, nodded to Jacobi, and said, "It is I, perhaps, that am doing
that," i.e. raining!--and Jacobi answered, "or perhaps I;" Gleim
contented himself with staring at them both, without asking for any
explanation.
So with regard to this passage. In what sense can the magnificent
attributes, above quoted, be appropriated to a child, which would not
make them equally suitable to a bee, or a dog, or afield of corn: or
even to a ship, or to the wind and waves that propel it? The
omnipresent Spirit works equally in them, as in the child; and the
child is equally unconscious of it as they. It cannot surely be, that
the four lines, immediately following, are to contain the explanation?
"To whom the grave
Is but a lonely bed without the sense or sight
Of day or the warm light,
A place of thought where we in waiting lie;"--
Surely, it cannot be that this wonder-rousing apostrophe is but a
comment on the little poem, "We are Seven?"--that the whole meaning of
the passage is reducible to the assertion, that a child, who by the
bye at six years old would have been better instructed in most
Christian families, has no other notion of death than that of lying in
a dark, cold place? And still, I hope, not as in a place of thought!
not the frightful notion of lying awake in his grave! The analogy
between death and sleep is too simple, too natural, to render so
horrid a belief possible for children; even had they not been in the
habit, as all Christian children are, of hearing the latter term used
to express the former. But if the child's belief be only, that "he is
not dead, but sleepeth:" wherein does it differ from that of his
father and mother, or any other adult and instructed person? To form
an idea of a thing's becoming nothing; or of nothing becoming a thing;
is impossible to all finite beings alike, of whatever age, and however
educated or uneducated. Thus it is with splendid paradoxes in general.
If the words are taken in the common sense, they convey an absurdity;
and if, in contempt of dictionaries and custom, they are so
interpreted as to avoid the absurdity, the meaning dwindles into some
bald truism. Thus you must at once understand the words contrary to
their common import, in order to arrive at any sense; and according to
their common import, if you are to receive from them any feeling of
sublimity or admiration.
Though the instances of this defect in Mr. Wordsworth's poems are so
few, that for themselves it would have been scarcely just to attract
the reader's attention toward them; yet I have dwelt on it, and
perhaps the more for this very reason. For being so very few, they
cannot sensibly detract from the reputation of an author, who is even
characterized by the number of profound truths in his writings, which
will stand the severest analysis; and yet few as they are, they are
exactly those passages which his blind admirers would be most likely,
and best able, to imitate. But Wordsworth, where he is indeed
Wordsworth, may be mimicked by copyists, he may be plundered by
plagiarists; but he cannot be imitated, except by those who are not
born to be imitators. For without his depth of feeling and his
imaginative power his sense would want its vital warmth and
peculiarity; and without his strong sense, his mysticism would become
sickly--mere fog, and dimness!
To these defects which, as appears by the extracts, are only
occasional, I may oppose, with far less fear of encountering the
dissent of any candid and intelligent reader, the following (for the
most part correspondent) excellencies. First, an austere purity of
language both grammatically and logically; in short a perfect
appropriateness of the words to the meaning. Of how high value I deem
this, and how particularly estimable I hold the example at the present
day, has been already stated: and in part too the reasons on which I
ground both the moral and intellectual importance of habituating
ourselves to a strict accuracy of expression. It is noticeable, how
limited an acquaintance with the masterpieces of art will suffice to
form a correct and even a sensitive taste, where none but master-
pieces have been seen and admired: while on the other hand, the most
correct notions, and the widest acquaintance with the works of
excellence of all ages and countries, will not perfectly secure us
against the contagious familiarity with the far more numerous
offspring of tastelessness or of a perverted taste. If this be the
case, as it notoriously is, with the arts of music and painting, much
more difficult will it be, to avoid the infection of multiplied and
daily examples in the practice of an art, which uses words, and words
only, as its instruments. In poetry, in which every line, every
phrase, may pass the ordeal of deliberation and deliberate choice, it
is possible, and barely possible, to attain that ultimatum which I
have ventured to propose as the infallible test of a blameless style;
namely: its untranslatableness in words of the same language without
injury to the meaning. Be it observed, however, that I include in the
meaning of a word not only its correspondent object, but likewise all
the associations which it recalls. For language is framed to convey
not the object alone but likewise the character, mood and intentions
of the person who is representing it. In poetry it is practicable to
preserve the diction uncorrupted by the affectations and
misappropriations, which promiscuous authorship, and reading not
promiscuous only because it is disproportionally most conversant with
the compositions of the day, have rendered general. Yet even to the
poet, composing in his own province, it is an arduous work: and as the
result and pledge of a watchful good sense of fine and luminous
distinction, and of complete self-possession, may justly claim all the
honour which belongs to an attainment equally difficult and valuable,
and the more valuable for being rare. It is at all times the proper
food of the understanding; but in an age of corrupt eloquence it is
both food and antidote.
In prose I doubt whether it be even possible to preserve our style
wholly unalloyed by the vicious phraseology which meets us everywhere,
from the sermon to the newspaper, from the harangue of the legislator
to the speech from the convivial chair, announcing a toast or
sentiment. Our chains rattle, even while we are complaining of them.
The poems of Boetius rise high in our estimation when we compare them
with those of his contemporaries, as Sidonius Apollinaris, and others.
They might even be referred to a purer age, but that the prose, in
which they are set, as jewels in a crown of lead or iron, betrays the
true age of the writer. Much however may be effected by education. I
believe not only from grounds of reason, but from having in great
measure assured myself of the fact by actual though limited
experience, that, to a youth led from his first boyhood to investigate
the meaning of every word and the reason of its choice and position,
logic presents itself as an old acquaintance under new names.
On some future occasion, more especially demanding such disquisition,
I shall attempt to prove the close connection between veracity and
habits of mental accuracy; the beneficial after-effects of verbal
precision in the preclusion of fanaticism, which masters the feelings
more especially by indistinct watch-words; and to display the
advantages which language alone, at least which language with
incomparably greater ease and certainty than any other means, presents
to the instructor of impressing modes of intellectual energy so
constantly, so imperceptibly, and as it were by such elements and
atoms, as to secure in due time the formation of a second nature. When
we reflect, that the cultivation of the judgment is a positive command
of the moral law, since the reason can give the principle alone, and
the conscience bears witness only to the motive, while the application
and effects must depend on the judgment when we consider, that the
greater part of our success and comfort in life depends on
distinguishing the similar from the same, that which is peculiar in
each thing from that which it has in common with others, so as still
to select the most probable, instead of the merely possible or
positively unfit, we shall learn to value earnestly and with a
practical seriousness a mean, already prepared for us by nature and
society, of teaching the young mind to think well and wisely by the
same unremembered process and with the same never forgotten results,
as those by which it is taught to speak and converse. Now how much
warmer the interest is, how much more genial the feelings of reality
and practicability, and thence how much stronger the impulses to
imitation are, which a contemporary writer, and especially a
contemporary poet, excites in youth and commencing manhood, has been
treated of in the earlier pages of these sketches. I have only to add,
that all the praise which is due to the exertion of such influence for
a purpose so important, joined with that which must be claimed for the
infrequency of the same excellence in the same perfection, belongs in
full right to Mr. Wordsworth. I am far however from denying that we
have poets whose general style possesses the same excellence, as Mr.
Moore, Lord Byron, Mr. Bowles, and, in all his later and more
important works, our laurel-honouring Laureate. But there are none, in
whose works I do not appear to myself to find more exceptions, than in
those of Wordsworth. Quotations or specimens would here be wholly out
of place, and must be left for the critic who doubts and would
invalidate the justice of this eulogy so applied.
The second characteristic excellence of Mr. Wordsworth's work is: a
correspondent weight and sanity of the Thoughts and Sentiments,--won,
not from books; but--from the poet's own meditative observation. They
are fresh and have the dew upon them. His muse, at least when in her
strength of wing, and when she hovers aloft in her proper element,
Makes audible a linked lay of truth,
Of truth profound a sweet continuous lay,
Not learnt, but native, her own natural notes!
Even throughout his smaller poems there is scarcely one, which is not
rendered valuable by some just and original reflection.
See page 25, vol. II.: or the two following passages in one of his
humblest compositions.
"O Reader! had you in your mind
Such stores as silent thought can bring,
O gentle Reader! you would find
A tale in every thing;"
and
"I've heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds
With coldness still returning;
Alas! the gratitude of men
Has oftener left me mourning;"
or in a still higher strain the six beautiful quatrains, page 134.
"Thus fares it still in our decay:
And yet the wiser mind
Mourns less for what age takes away
Than what it leaves behind.
The Blackbird in the summer trees,
The Lark upon the hill,
Let loose their carols when they please,
Are quiet when they will.
With Nature never do they wage
A foolish strife; they see
A happy youth, and their old age
Is beautiful and free!
But we are pressed by heavy laws;
And often glad no more,
We wear a face of joy, because
We have been glad of yore.
If there is one, who need bemoan
His kindred laid in earth,
The household hearts that were his own,
It is the man of mirth.
My days, my Friend, are almost gone,
My life has been approved,
And many love me; but by none
Am I enough beloved;"
or the sonnet on Buonaparte, page 202, vol. II. or finally (for a
volume would scarce suffice to exhaust the instances,) the last stanza
of the poem on the withered Celandine, vol. II. p. 312.
"To be a Prodigal's Favorite--then, worse truth,
A Miser's Pensioner--behold our lot!
O Man! That from thy fair and shining youth
Age might but take the things Youth needed not."
Both in respect of this and of the former excellence, Mr. Wordsworth
strikingly resembles Samuel Daniel, one of the golden writers of our
golden Elizabethan age, now most causelessly neglected: Samuel Daniel,
whose diction bears no mark of time, no distinction of age which has
been, and as long as our language shall last, will be so far the
language of the to-day and for ever, as that it is more intelligible
to us, than the transitory fashions of our own particular age. A
similar praise is due to his sentiments. No frequency of perusal can
deprive them of their freshness. For though they are brought into the
full day-light of every reader's comprehension; yet are they drawn up
from depths which few in any age are privileged to visit, into which
few in any age have courage or inclination to descend. If Mr.
Wordsworth is not equally with Daniel alike intelligible to all
readers of average understanding in all passages of his works, the
comparative difficulty does not arise from the greater impurity of the
ore, but from the nature and uses of the metal. A poem is not
necessarily obscure, because it does not aim to be popular. It is
enough, if a work be perspicuous to those for whom it is written, and
"Fit audience find, though few."
To the "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of
early Childhood" the poet might have prefixed the lines which Dante
addresses to one of his own Canzoni--
"Canzone, i' credo, che saranno radi
Color, che tua ragione intendan bene,
Tanto lor sei faticoso ed alto."
"O lyric song, there will be few, I think,
Who may thy import understand aright:
Thou art for them so arduous and so high!"
But the ode was intended for such readers only as had been accustomed
to watch the flux and reflux of their inmost nature, to venture at
times into the twilight realms of consciousness, and to feel a deep
interest in modes of inmost being, to which they know that the
attributes of time and space are inapplicable and alien, but which yet
can not be conveyed, save in symbols of time and space. For such
readers the sense is sufficiently plain, and they will be as little
disposed to charge Mr. Wordsworth with believing the Platonic pre-
existence in the ordinary interpretation of the words, as I am to
believe, that Plato himself ever meant or taught it.
Polla oi ut' anko-
nos okea belae
endon enti pharetras
phonanta synetoisin; es
de to pan hermaeneon
chatizei; sophos o pol-
la eidos phua;
mathontes de labroi
panglossia, korakes os,
akranta garueton
Dios pros ornicha theion.
Third (and wherein he soars far above Daniel) the sinewy strength and
originality of single lines and paragraphs: the frequent curiosa
felicitas of his diction, of which I need not here give specimens,
having anticipated them in a preceding page. This beauty, and as
eminently characteristic of Wordsworth's poetry, his rudest assailants
have felt themselves compelled to acknowledge and admire.
Fourth; the perfect truth of nature in his images and descriptions as
taken immediately from nature, and proving a long and genial intimacy
with the very spirit which gives the physiognomic expression to all
the works of nature. Like a green field reflected in a calm and
perfectly transparent lake, the image is distinguished from the
reality only by its greater softness and lustre. Like the moisture or
the polish on a pebble, genius neither distorts nor false-colours its
objects; but on the contrary brings out many a vein and many a tint,
which escape the eye of common observation, thus raising to the rank
of gems what had been often kicked away by the hurrying foot of the
traveller on the dusty high road of custom.
Let me refer to the whole description of skating, vol. I. page 42 to
47, especially to the lines
"So through the darkness and the cold we flew,
And not a voice was idle. with the din
Meanwhile the precipices rang aloud;
The leafless trees and every icy crag
Tinkled like iron; while the distant hills
Into the tumult sent an alien sound
Of melancholy, not unnoticed, while the stars,
Eastward, were sparkling clear, and in the west
The orange sky of evening died away."
Or to the poem on THE GREEN LINNET, vol. I. page 244. What can be more
accurate yet more lovely than the two concluding stanzas?
"Upon yon tuft of hazel trees,
That twinkle to the gusty breeze,
Behold him perched in ecstasies,
Yet seeming still to hover;
There! where the flutter of his wings
Upon his back and body flings
Shadows and sunny glimmerings,
That cover him all over.
While thus before my eyes he gleams,
A Brother of the Leaves he seems;
When in a moment forth he teems
His little song in gushes
As if it pleased him to disdain
And mock the Form which he did feign
While he was dancing with the train
Of Leaves among the bushes."
Or the description of the blue-cap, and of the noontide silence, page
284; or the poem to the cuckoo, page 299; or, lastly, though I might
multiply the references to ten times the number, to the poem, so
completely Wordsworth's, commencing
"Three years she grew in sun and shower"--
Fifth: a meditative pathos, a union of deep and subtle thought with
sensibility; a sympathy with man as man; the sympathy indeed of a
contemplator, rather than a fellow-sufferer or co-mate, (spectator,
haud particeps) but of a contemplator, from whose view no difference
of rank conceals the sameness of the nature; no injuries of wind or
weather, or toil, or even of ignorance, wholly disguise the human face
divine. The superscription and the image of the Creator still remain
legible to him under the dark lines, with which guilt or calamity had
cancelled or cross-barred it. Here the Man and the Poet lose and find
themselves in each other, the one as glorified, the latter as
substantiated. In this mild and philosophic pathos, Wordsworth appears
to me without a compeer. Such as he is: so he writes. See vol. I. page
134 to 136, or that most affecting composition, THE AFFLICTION OF
MARGARET ---- OF ----, page 165 to 168, which no mother, and, if I may
judge by my own experience, no parent can read without a tear. Or turn
to that genuine lyric, in the former edition, entitled, THE MAD
MOTHER, page 174 to 178, of which I cannot refrain from quoting two of
the stanzas, both of them for their pathos, and the former for the
fine transition in the two concluding lines of the stanza, so
expressive of that deranged state, in which, from the increased
sensibility, the sufferer's attention is abruptly drawn off by every
trifle, and in the same instant plucked back again by the one despotic
thought, bringing home with it, by the blending, fusing power of
Imagination and Passion, the alien object to which it had been so
abruptly diverted, no longer an alien but an ally and an inmate.
"Suck, little babe, oh suck again!
It cools my blood; it cools my brain;
Thy lips, I feel them, baby! They
Draw from my heart the pain away.
Oh! press me with thy little hand;
It loosens something at my chest
About that tight and deadly band
I feel thy little fingers prest.
The breeze I see is in the tree!
It comes to cool my babe and me."
"Thy father cares not for my breast,
'Tis thine, sweet baby, there to rest;
'Tis all thine own!--and if its hue
Be changed, that was so fair to view,
'Tis fair enough for thee, my dove!
My beauty, little child, is flown,
But thou wilt live with me in love;
And what if my poor cheek be brown?
'Tis well for me, thou canst not see
How pale and wan it else would be."
Last, and pre-eminently, I challenge for this poet the gift of
Imagination in the highest and strictest sense of the word. In the
play of fancy, Wordsworth, to my feelings, is not always graceful, and
sometimes recondite. The likeness is occasionally too strange, or
demands too peculiar a point of view, or is such as appears the
creature of predetermined research, rather than spontaneous
presentation. Indeed his fancy seldom displays itself, as mere and
unmodified fancy. But in imaginative power, he stands nearest of all
modern writers to Shakespeare and Milton; and yet in a kind perfectly
unborrowed and his own. To employ his own words, which are at once an
instance and an illustration, he does indeed to all thoughts and to
all objects--
"------add the gleam,
The light that never was, on sea or land,
The consecration, and the Poet's dream."
I shall select a few examples as most obviously manifesting this
faculty; but if I should ever be fortunate enough to render my
analysis of Imagination, its origin and characters, thoroughly
intelligible to the reader, he will scarcely open on a page of this
poet's works without recognising, more or less, the presence and the
influences of this faculty. From the poem on the YEW TREES, vol. I.
page 303, 304.
"But worthier still of note
Are those fraternal Four of Borrowdale,
Joined in one solemn and capacious grove;
Huge trunks!--and each particular trunk a growth
Of intertwisted fibres serpentine
Up-coiling, and inveterately convolved;
Not uninformed with phantasy, and looks
That threaten the profane;--a pillared shade,
Upon whose grassless floor of red-brown hue,
By sheddings from the pinal umbrage tinged
Perennially--beneath whose sable roof
Of boughs, as if for festal purpose, decked
With unrejoicing berries--ghostly shapes
May meet at noontide; FEAR and trembling HOPE,
SILENCE and FORESIGHT; DEATH, the Skeleton,
And TIME, the Shadow; there to celebrate,
As in a natural temple scattered o'er
With altars undisturbed of mossy stone,
United worship; or in mute repose
To lie, and listen to the mountain flood
Murmuring from Glazamara's inmost caves."
The effect of the old man's figure in the poem of RESOLUTION AND
INDEPENDENCE, vol. II. page 33.
"While he was talking thus, the lonely place,
The Old Man's shape, and speech, all troubled me
In my mind's eye I seemed to see him pace
About the weary moors continually,
Wandering about alone and silently."
Or the 8th, 9th, 19th, 26th, 31st, and 33rd, in the collection of
miscellaneous sonnets--the sonnet on the subjugation of Switzerland,
page 210, or the last ode, from which I especially select the two
following stanzas or paragraphs, page 349 to 350.
"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy;
But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy!
The Youth who daily further from the East
Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day."
And page 352 to 354 of the same ode.
"O joy! that in our embers
Is something that doth live,
That nature yet remembers
What was so fugitive!
The thought of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benedictions: not indeed
For that which is most worthy to be blest;
Delight and liberty, the simple creed
Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest,
With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast:--
Not for these I raise
The song of thanks and praise;
But for those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realized,
High instincts, before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised!
But for those first affections,
Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may,
Are yet the fountain light of all our day,
Are yet a master light of all our seeing;
Uphold us--cherish--and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence; truths that wake
To perish never;
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,
Nor Man nor Boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy!
Hence, in a season of calm weather,
Though inland far we be,
Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither;
Can in a moment travel thither,--
And see the children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore."
And since it would be unfair to conclude with an extract, which,
though highly characteristic, must yet, from the nature of the
thoughts and the subject, be interesting or perhaps intelligible, to
but a limited number of readers; I will add, from the poet's last
published work, a passage equally Wordsworthian; of the beauty of
which, and of the imaginative power displayed therein, there can be
but one opinion, and one feeling. See White Doe, page 5.
"Fast the church-yard fills;--anon
Look again and they all are gone;
The cluster round the porch, and the folk
Who sate in the shade of the Prior's Oak!
And scarcely have they disappeared
Ere the prelusive hymn is heard;--
With one consent the people rejoice,
Filling the church with a lofty voice!
They sing a service which they feel:
For 'tis the sun-rise now of zeal;
And faith and hope are in their prime
In great Eliza's golden time."
"A moment ends the fervent din,
And all is hushed, without and within;
For though the priest, more tranquilly,
Recites the holy liturgy,
The only voice which you can hear
Is the river murmuring near.
--When soft!--the dusky trees between,
And down the path through the open green,
Where is no living thing to be seen;
And through yon gateway, where is found,
Beneath the arch with ivy bound,
Free entrance to the church-yard ground--
And right across the verdant sod,
Towards the very house of God;
Comes gliding in with lovely gleam,
Comes gliding in serene and slow,
Soft and silent as a dream.
A solitary Doe!
White she is as lily of June,
And beauteous as the silver moon
When out of sight the clouds are driven
And she is left alone in heaven!
Or like a ship some gentle day
In sunshine sailing far away
A glittering ship that hath the plain
Of ocean for her own domain."
*     *     *     *     *     *
"What harmonious pensive changes
Wait upon her as she ranges
Round and through this Pile of state
Overthrown and desolate!
Now a step or two her way
Is through space of open day,
Where the enamoured sunny light
Brightens her that was so bright;
Now doth a delicate shadow fall,
Falls upon her like a breath,
From some lofty arch or wall,
As she passes underneath."
The following analogy will, I am apprehensive, appear dim and
fantastic, but in reading Bartram's Travels I could not help
transcribing the following lines as a sort of allegory, or connected
simile and metaphor of Wordsworth's intellect and genius.--"The soil
is a deep, rich, dark mould, on a deep stratum of tenacious clay; and
that on a foundation of rocks, which often break through both strata,
lifting their backs above the surface. The trees which chiefly grow
here are the gigantic, black oak; magnolia grandi-flora; fraximus
excelsior; platane; and a few stately tulip trees." What Mr.
Wordsworth will produce, it is not for me to prophesy but I could
pronounce with the liveliest convictions what he is capable of
producing. It is the FIRST GENUINE PHILOSOPHIC POEM.
The preceding criticism will not, I am aware, avail to overcome the
prejudices of those, who have made it a business to attack and
ridicule Mr. Wordsworth's compositions.
Truth and prudence might be imaged as concentric circles. The poet may
perhaps have passed beyond the latter, but he has confined himself far
within the bounds of the former, in designating these critics, as "too
petulant to be passive to a genuine poet, and too feeble to grapple
with him;----men of palsied imaginations, in whose minds all healthy
action is languid;----who, therefore, feed as the many direct them, or
with the many are greedy after vicious provocatives."
So much for the detractors from Wordsworth's merits. On the other
hand, much as I might wish for their fuller sympathy, I dare not
flatter myself, that the freedom with which I have declared my
opinions concerning both his theory and his defects, most of which are
more or less connected with his theory, either as cause or effect,
will be satisfactory or pleasing to all the poet's admirers and
advocates. More indiscriminate than mine their admiration may be:
deeper and more sincere it cannot be. But I have advanced no opinion
either for praise or censure, other than as texts introductory to the
reasons which compel me to form it. Above all, I was fully convinced
that such a criticism was not only wanted; but that, if executed with
adequate ability, it must conduce, in no mean degree, to Mr.
Wordsworth's reputation. His fame belongs to another age, and can
neither be accelerated nor retarded. How small the proportion of the
defects are to the beauties, I have repeatedly declared; and that no
one of them originates in deficiency of poetic genius. Had they been
more and greater, I should still, as a friend to his literary
character in the present age, consider an analytic display of them as
pure gain; if only it removed, as surely to all reflecting minds even
the foregoing analysis must have removed, the strange mistake, so
slightly grounded, yet so widely and industriously propagated, of Mr.
Wordsworth's turn for simplicity! I am not half as much irritated by
hearing his enemies abuse him for vulgarity of style, subject, and
conception, as I am disgusted with the gilded side of the same
meaning, as displayed by some affected admirers, with whom he is,
forsooth, a "sweet, simple poet!" and so natural, that little master
Charles and his younger sister are so charmed with them, that they
play at "Goody Blake," or at "Johnny and Betty Foy!"
Were the collection of poems, published with these biographical
sketches, important enough, (which I am not vain enough to believe,)
to deserve such a distinction; even as I have done, so would I be done
unto.
For more than eighteen months have the volume of Poems, entitled
SIBYLLINE LEAVES, and the present volume, up to this page, been
printed, and ready for publication. But, ere I speak of myself in the
tones, which are alone natural to me under the circumstances of late
years, I would fain present myself to the Reader as I was in the first
dawn of my literary life:
When Hope grew round me, like the climbing vine,
And fruits, and foliage, not my own, seem'd mine!
For this purpose I have selected from the letters, which I wrote home
from Germany, those which appeared likely to be most interesting, and
at the same time most pertinent to the title of this work.
SATYRANE'S LETTERS
LETTER I
On Sunday morning, September 16, 1798, the Hamburg packet set sail
from Yarmouth; and I, for the first time in my life, beheld my native
land retiring from me. At the moment of its disappearance--in all the
kirks, churches, chapels, and meeting-houses, in which the greater
number, I hope, of my countrymen were at that time assembled, I will
dare question whether there was one more ardent prayer offered up to
heaven, than that which I then preferred for my country. "Now then,"
(said I to a gentleman who was standing near me,) "we are out of our
country." "Not yet, not yet!" he replied, and pointed to the sea;
"This, too, is a Briton's country." This bon mot gave a fillip to my
spirits, I rose and looked round on my fellow-passengers, who were all
on the deck. We were eighteen in number, videlicet, five Englishmen,
an English lady, a French gentleman and his servant, an Hanoverian and
his servant, a Prussian, a Swede, two Danes, and a Mulatto boy, a
German tailor and his wife, (the smallest couple I ever beheld,) and a
Jew. We were all on the deck; but in a short time I observed marks of
dismay. The lady retired to the cabin in some confusion, and many of
the faces round me assumed a very doleful and frog-coloured
appearance; and within an hour the number of those on deck was
lessened by one half. I was giddy, but not sick, and the giddiness
soon went away, but left a feverishness and want of appetite, which I
attributed, in great measure, to the saeva Mephitis of the bilge-
water; and it was certainly not decreased by the exportations from the
cabin. However, I was well enough to join the able-bodied passengers,
one of whom observed not inaptly, that Momus might have discovered an
easier way to see a man's inside, than by placing a window in his
breast. He needed only have taken a saltwater trip in a packet-boat.
I am inclined to believe, that a packet is far superior to a stage-
coach, as a means of making men open out to each other. In the latter
the uniformity of posture disposes to dozing, and the definitiveness
of the period, at which the company will separate, makes each
individual think more of those to whom he is going, than of those with
whom he is going. But at sea, more curiosity is excited, if only on
this account, that the pleasant or unpleasant qualities of your
companions are of greater importance to you, from the uncertainty how
long you may be obliged to house with them. Besides, if you are
countrymen, that now begins to form a distinction and a bond of
brotherhood; and if of different countries, there are new incitements
of conversation, more to ask and more to communicate. I found that I
had interested the Danes in no common degree. I had crept into the
boat on the deck and fallen asleep; but was awakened by one of them,
about three o'clock in the afternoon, who told me that they had been
seeking me in every hole and corner, and insisted that I should join
their party and drink with them. He talked English with such fluency,
as left me wholly unable to account for the singular and even
ludicrous incorrectness with which he spoke it. I went, and found some
excellent wines and a dessert of grapes with a pine-apple. The Danes
had christened me Doctor Teology, and dressed as I was all in black,
with large shoes and black worsted stockings, I might certainly have
passed very well for a Methodist missionary. However I disclaimed my
title. What then may you be? A man of fortune? No!--A merchant? No!--A
merchant's traveller? No!--A clerk? No!--Un Philosophe, perhaps? It
was at that time in my life, in which of all possible names and
characters I had the greatest disgust to that of "un Philosophe." But
I was weary of being questioned, and rather than be nothing, or at
best only the abstract idea of a man, I submitted by a bow, even to
the aspersion implied in the word "un Philosophe."--The Dane then
informed me, that all in the present party were Philosophers likewise.
Certes we were not of the Stoick school. For we drank and talked and
sung, till we talked and sung all together; and then we rose and
danced on the deck a set of dances, which in one sense of the word at
least, were very intelligibly and appropriately entitled reels. The
passengers, who lay in the cabin below in all the agonies of sea-
sickness, must have found our bacchanalian merriment
------a tune
Harsh and of dissonant mood from their complaint.
I thought so at the time; and, (by way, I suppose, of supporting my
newly assumed philosophical character,) I thought too, how closely the
greater number of our virtues are connected with the fear of death,
and how little sympathy we bestow on pain, where there is no danger.
The two Danes were brothers. The one was a man with a clear white
complexion, white hair, and white eyebrows; looked silly, and nothing
that he uttered gave the lie to his looks. The other, whom, by way of
eminence I have called the Dane, had likewise white hair, but was much
shorter than his brother, with slender limbs, and a very thin face
slightly pockfretten. This man convinced me of the justice of an old
remark, that many a faithful portrait in our novels and farces has
been rashly censured for an outrageous caricature, or perhaps
nonentity. I had retired to my station in the boat--he came and seated
himself by my side, and appeared not a little tipsy. He commenced the
conversation in the most magnific style, and, as a sort of pioneering
to his own vanity, he flattered me with such grossness! The parasites
of the old comedy were modest in the comparison. His language and
accentuation were so exceedingly singular, that I determined for once
in my life to take notes of a conversation. Here it follows, somewhat
abridged, indeed, but in all other respects as accurately as my memory
permitted.
THE DANE.  Vat imagination! vat language! vat vast science! and vat
eyes! vat a milk-vite forehead! O my heafen! vy, you're a Got!
ANSWER.  You do me too much honour, Sir.
THE DANE.  O me! if you should dink I is flattering you!--No, no, no!
I haf ten tousand a year--yes, ten tousand a year--yes, ten tousand
pound a year! Vel--and vat is dhat? a mere trifle! I 'ouldn't gif my
sincere heart for ten times dhe money. Yes, you're a Got! I a mere
man! But, my dear friend! dhink of me, as a man! Is, is--I mean to ask
you now, my dear friend--is I not very eloquent? Is I not speak
English very fine?
ANSWER.  Most admirably! Believe me, Sir! I have seldom heard even a
native talk so fluently.
THE DANE.  (Squeezing my hand with great vehemence.) My dear friend!
vat an affection and fidelity ve have for each odher! But tell me, do
tell me,--Is I not, now and den, speak some fault? Is I not in some
wrong?
ANSWER.  Why, Sir! perhaps it might be observed by nice critics in the
English language, that you occasionally use the word "is" instead of
"am." In our best companies we generally say I am, and not I is or
I'se. Excuse me, Sir! it is a mere trifle.
THE DANE.  O!--is, is, am, am, am. Yes, yes--I know, I know.
ANSWER.  I am, thou art, he is, we are, ye are, they are.
THE DANE.  Yes, yes,--I know, I know--Am, am, am, is dhe praesens, and
is is dhe perfectum--yes, yes--and are is dhe plusquam perfectum.
ANSWER.  And art, Sir! is--?
THE DANE.  My dear friend! it is dhe plusquam perfectum, no, no--dhat
is a great lie; are is dhe plusquam perfectum--and art is dhe plasquam
plue-perfectum--(then swinging my hand to and fro, and cocking his
little bright hazel eyes at me, that danced with vanity and wine)--You
see, my dear friend that I too have some lehrning?
ANSWER.  Learning, Sir? Who dares suspect it? Who can listen to you
for a minute, who can even look at you, without perceiving the extent
of it?
THE DANE.  My dear friend!--(then with a would-be humble look, and in
a tone of voice as if he was reasoning) I could not talk so of prawns
and imperfectum, and futurum and plusquamplue perfectum, and all dhat,
my dear friend! without some lehrning?
ANSWER.  Sir! a man like you cannot talk on any subject without
discovering the depth of his information.
THE DANE.  Dhe grammatic Greek, my friend; ha! ha! Ha! (laughing, and
swinging my hand to and fro--then with a sudden transition to great
solemnity) Now I will tell you, my dear friend! Dhere did happen about
me vat de whole historia of Denmark record no instance about nobody
else. Dhe bishop did ask me all dhe questions about all dhe religion
in dhe Latin grammar.
ANSWER.  The grammar, Sir? The language, I presume--
THE DANE.  (A little offended.) Grammar is language, and language is
grammar--
ANSWER.  Ten thousand pardons!
THE DANE.  Vell, and I was only fourteen years--
ANSWER.  Only fourteen years old?
THE DANE. No more. I vas fourteen years old--and he asked me all
questions, religion and philosophy, and all in dhe Latin language--and
I answered him all every one, my dear friend! all in dhe Latin
language.
ANSWER.  A prodigy! an absolute prodigy!
THE DANE.  No, no, no! he was a bishop, a great superintendent.
ANSWER.  Yes! a bishop.
THE DANE.  A bishop--not a mere predicant, not a prediger.
ANSWER.  My dear Sir! we have misunderstood each other. I said that
your answering in Latin at so early an age was a prodigy, that is, a
thing that is wonderful; that does not often happen.
THE DANE.  Often! Dhere is not von instance recorded in dhe whole
historia of Denmark.
ANSWER.  And since then, Sir--?
THE DANE.  I was sent ofer to dhe Vest Indies--to our Island, and
dhere I had no more to do vid books. No! no! I put my genius anodher
way--and I haf made ten tousand pound a year. Is not dhat ghenius, my
dear friend?--But vat is money?--I dhink dhe poorest man alive my
equal. Yes, my dear friend; my little fortune is pleasant to my
generous heart, because I can do good--no man with so little a fortune
ever did so much generosity--no person--no man person, no woman person
ever denies it. But we are all Got's children.
Here the Hanoverian interrupted him, and the other Dane, the Swede,
and the Prussian, joined us, together with a young Englishman who
spoke the German fluently, and interpreted to me many of the
Prussian's jokes. The Prussian was a travelling merchant, turned of
threescore, a hale man, tall, strong, and stout, full of stories,
gesticulations, and buffoonery, with the soul as well as the look of a
mountebank, who, while he is making you laugh, picks your pocket. Amid
all his droll looks and droll gestures, there remained one look
untouched by laughter; and that one look was the true face, the others
were but its mask. The Hanoverian was a pale, fat, bloated young man,
whose father had made a large fortune in London, as an army-
contractor. He seemed to emulate the manners of young Englishmen of
fortune. He was a good-natured fellow, not without information or
literature; but a most egregious coxcomb. He had been in the habit of
attending the House of Commons, and had once spoken, as he informed
me, with great applause in a debating society. For this he appeared to
have qualified himself with laudable industry: for he was perfect in
Walker's Pronouncing Dictionary, and with an accent, which forcibly
reminded me of the Scotchman in Roderic Random, who professed to teach
the English pronunciation, he was constantly deferring to my superior
judgment, whether or no I had pronounced this or that word with
propriety, or "the true delicacy." When he spoke, though it were only
half a dozen sentences, he always rose: for which I could detect no
other motive, than his partiality to that elegant phrase so liberally
introduced in the orations of our British legislators, "While I am on
my legs." The Swede, whom for reasons that will soon appear, I shall
distinguish by the name of Nobility, was a strong-featured, scurvy-
faced man, his complexion resembling in colour, a red hot poker
beginning to cool. He appeared miserably dependent on the Dane; but
was, however, incomparably the best informed and most rational of the
party. Indeed his manners and conversation discovered him to be both a
man of the world and a gentleman. The Jew was in the hold: the French
gentleman was lying on the deck so ill, that I could observe nothing
concerning him, except the affectionate attentions of his servant to
him. The poor fellow was very sick himself, and every now and then ran
to the side of the vessel, still keeping his eye on his master, but
returned in a moment and seated himself again by him, now supporting
his head, now wiping his forehead and talking to him all the while in
the most soothing tones. There had been a matrimonial squabble of a
very ludicrous kind in the cabin, between the little German tailor and
his little wife. He had secured two beds, one for himself and one for
her. This had struck the little woman as a very cruel action; she
insisted upon their having but one, and assured the mate in the most
piteous tones, that she was his lawful wife. The mate and the cabin
boy decided in her favour, abused the little man for his want of
tenderness with much humour, and hoisted him into the same compartment
with his sea-sick wife. This quarrel was interesting to me, as it
procured me a bed, which I otherwise should not have had.
In the evening, at seven o'clock, the sea rolled higher, and the Dane,
by means of the greater agitation, eliminated enough of what he had
been swallowing to make room for a great deal more. His favourite
potation was sugar and brandy, i.e. a very little warm water with a
large quantity of brandy, sugar, and nutmeg His servant boy, a black-
eyed Mulatto, had a good-natured round face, exactly the colour of the
skin of the walnut-kernel. The Dane and I were again seated, tete-a-
tete, in the ship's boat. The conversation, which was now indeed
rather an oration than a dialogue, became extravagant beyond all that
I ever heard. He told me that he had made a large fortune in the
island of Santa Cruz, and was now returning to Denmark to enjoy it. He
expatiated on the style in which he meant to live, and the great
undertakings which he proposed to himself to commence, till, the
brandy aiding his vanity, and his vanity and garrulity aiding the
brandy, he talked like a madman--entreated me to accompany him to
Denmark--there I should see his influence with the government, and he
would introduce me to the king, etc., etc. Thus he went on dreaming
aloud, and then passing with a very lyrical transition to the subject
of general politics, he declaimed, like a member of the Corresponding
Society, about, (not concerning,) the Rights of Man, and assured me
that, notwithstanding his fortune, he thought the poorest man alive
his equal. "All are equal, my dear friend! all are equal! Ve are all
Got's children. The poorest man haf the same rights with me. Jack!
Jack! some more sugar and brandy. Dhere is dhat fellow now! He is a
Mulatto--but he is my equal.--That's right, Jack! (taking the sugar
and brandy.) Here you Sir! shake hands with dhis gentleman! Shake
hands with me, you dog! Dhere, dhere!--We are all equal my dear
friend! Do I not speak like Socrates, and Plato, and Cato--they were
all philosophers, my dear philosophe! all very great men!--and so was
Homer and Virgil--but they were poets. Yes, yes! I know all about it!
--But what can anybody say more than this? We are all equal, all Got's
children. I haf ten tousand a year, but I am no more dhan de meanest
man alive. I haf no pride; and yet, my dear friend! I can say, do! and
it is done. Ha! ha! ha! my dear friend! Now dhere is dhat gentleman
(pointing to Nobility) he is a Swedish baron--you shall see. Ho!
(calling to the Swede) get me, will you, a bottle of wine from the
cabin. SWEDE.--Here, Jack! go and get your master a bottle of wine
from the cabin. DANE. No, no, no! do you go now--you go yourself you
go now! SWEDE. Pah!--DANE. Now go! Go, I pray you." And the Swede
went!!
After this the Dane commenced an harangue on religion, and mistaking
me for un philosophe in the continental sense of the word, he talked
of Deity in a declamatory style, very much resembling the devotional
rants of that rude blunderer, Mr. Thomas Paine, in his Age of Reason,
and whispered in my ear, what damned hypocrism all Jesus Christ's
business was. I dare aver, that few men have less reason to charge
themselves with indulging in persiflage than myself. I should hate it,
if it were only that it is a Frenchman's vice, and feel a pride in
avoiding it, because our own language is too honest to have a word to
express it by. But in this instance the temptation had been too
powerful, and I have placed it on the list of my offences. Pericles
answered one of his dearest friends, who had solicited him on a case
of life and death, to take an equivocal oath for his preservation:
Debeo amicis opitulari, sed usque ad Deos [75]. Friendship herself
must place her last and boldest step on this side the altar. What
Pericles would not do to save a friend's life, you may be assured, I
would not hazard merely to mill the chocolate-pot of a drunken fool's
vanity till it frothed over. Assuming a serious look, I professed
myself a believer, and sunk at once an hundred fathoms in his good
graces. He retired to his cabin, and I wrapped myself up in my great
coat, and looked at the water. A beautiful white cloud of foam at
momently intervals coursed by the side of the vessel with a roar, and
little stars of flame danced and sparkled and went out in it: and
every now and then light detachments of this white cloud-like foam
darted off from the vessel's side, each with its own small
constellation, over the sea, and scoured out of sight like a Tartar
troop over a wilderness.
It was cold, the cabin was at open war with my olfactories, and I
found reason to rejoice in my great coat, a weighty high-caped,
respectable rug, the collar of which turned over, and played the part
of a night-cap very passably. In looking up at two or three bright
stars, which oscillated with the motion of the sails, I fell asleep,
but was awakened at one o'clock, Monday morning, by a shower of rain.
I found myself compelled to go down into the cabin, where I slept very
soundly, and awoke with a very good appetite at breakfast time, my
nostrils, the most placable of all the senses, reconciled to, or
indeed insensible of the mephitis.
Monday, September 17th, I had a long conversation with the Swede, who
spoke with the most poignant contempt of the Dane, whom he described
as a fool, purse-mad; but he confirmed the boasts of the Dane
respecting the largeness of his fortune, which he had acquired in the
first instance as an advocate, and afterwards as a planter. From the
Dane and from himself I collected that he was indeed a Swedish
nobleman, who had squandered a fortune, that was never very large, and
had made over his property to the Dane, on whom he was now utterly
dependent. He seemed to suffer very little pain from the Dane's
insolence. He was in a high degree humane and attentive to the English
lady, who suffered most fearfully, and for whom he performed many
little offices with a tenderness and delicacy which seemed to prove
real goodness of heart. Indeed his general manners and conversation
were not only pleasing, but even interesting; and I struggled to
believe his insensibility respecting the Dane philosophical fortitude.
For though the Dane was now quite sober, his character oozed out of
him at every pore. And after dinner, when he was again flushed with
wine, every quarter of an hour or perhaps oftener he would shout out
to the Swede, "Ho! Nobility, go--do such a thing! Mr. Nobility!--tell
the gentlemen such a story, and so forth;" with an insolence which
must have excited disgust and detestation, if his vulgar rants on the
sacred rights of equality, joined to his wild havoc of general grammar
no less than of the English language, had not rendered it so
irresistibly laughable.
At four o'clock I observed a wild duck swimming on the waves, a single
solitary wild duck. It is not easy to conceive, how interesting a
thing it looked in that round objectless desert of waters. I had
associated such a feeling of immensity with the ocean, that I felt
exceedingly disappointed, when I was out of sight of all land, at the
narrowness and nearness, as it were, of the circle of the horizon. So
little are images capable of satisfying the obscure feelings connected
with words. In the evening the sails were lowered, lest we should run
foul of the land, which can be seen only at a small distance. And at
four o'clock, on Tuesday morning, I was awakened by the cry of "land!
land!" It was an ugly island rock at a distance on our left, called
Heiligeland, well known to many passengers from Yarmouth to Hamburg,
who have been obliged by stormy weather to pass weeks and weeks in
weary captivity on it, stripped of all their money by the exorbitant
demands of the wretches who inhabit it. So at least the sailors
informed me.--About nine o'clock we saw the main land, which seemed
scarcely able to hold its head above water, low, flat, and dreary,
with lighthouses and land-marks which seemed to give a character and
language to the dreariness. We entered the mouth of the Elbe, passing
Neu-werk; though as yet the right bank only of the river was visible
to us. On this I saw a church, and thanked God for my safe voyage, not
without affectionate thoughts of those I had left in England. At
eleven o'clock on the same morning we arrived at Cuxhaven, the ship
dropped anchor, and the boat was hoisted out, to carry the Hanoverian
and a few others on shore. The captain agreed to take us, who
remained, to Hamburg for ten guineas, to which the Dane contributed so
largely, that the other passengers paid but half a guinea each.
Accordingly we hauled anchor, and passed gently up the river. At
Cuxhaven both sides of the river may be seen in clear weather; we
could now see the right bank only. We passed a multitude of English
traders that had been waiting many weeks for a wind. In a short time
both banks became visible, both flat and evidencing the labour of
human hands by their extreme neatness. On the left bank I saw a church
or two in the distance; on the right bank we passed by steeple and
windmill and cottage, and windmill and single house, windmill and
windmill, and neat single house, and steeple. These were the objects
and in the succession. The shores were very green and planted with
trees not inelegantly. Thirty-five miles from Cuxhaven the night came
on us, and, as the navigation of the Elbe is perilous, we dropped
anchor.
Over what place, thought I, does the moon hang to your eye, my dearest
friend? To me it hung over the left bank of the Elbe. Close above the
moon was a huge volume of deep black cloud, while a very thin fillet
crossed the middle of the orb, as narrow and thin and black as a
ribbon of crape. The long trembling road of moonlight, which lay on
the water and reached to the stern of our vessel, glimmered dimly and
obscurely. We saw two or three lights from the right bank, probably
from bed-rooms. I felt the striking contrast between the silence of
this majestic stream, whose banks are populous with men and women and
children, and flocks and herds--between the silence by night of this
peopled river, and the ceaseless noise, and uproar, and loud
agitations of the desolate solitude of the ocean. The passengers below
had all retired to their beds; and I felt the interest of this quiet
scene the more deeply from the circumstance of having just quitted
them. For the Prussian had during the whole of the evening displayed
all his talents to captivate the Dane, who had admitted him into the
train of his dependents. The young Englishman continued to interpret
the Prussian's jokes to me. They were all without exception profane
and abominable, but some sufficiently witty, and a few incidents,
which he related in his own person, were valuable as illustrating the
manners of the countries in which they had taken place.
Five o'clock on Wednesday morning we hauled the anchor, but were soon
obliged to drop it again in consequence of a thick fog, which our
captain feared would continue the whole day; but about nine it cleared
off, and we sailed slowly along, close by the shore of a very
beautiful island, forty miles from Cuxhaven, the wind continuing
slack. This holm or island is about a mile and a half in length,
wedge-shaped, well wooded, with glades of the liveliest green, and
rendered more interesting by the remarkably neat farm-house on it. It
seemed made for retirement without solitude--a place that would allure
one's friends, while it precluded the impertinent calls of mere
visitors. The shores of the Elbe now became more beautiful, with rich
meadows and trees running like a low wall along the river's edge; and
peering over them, neat houses and, (especially on the right bank,) a
profusion of steeple-spires, white, black, or red. An instinctive
taste teaches men to build their churches in flat countries with
spire-steeples, which, as they cannot be referred to any other object,
point, as with silent finger, to the sky and stars, and sometimes,
when they reflect the brazen light of a rich though rainy sun-set,
appear like a pyramid of flame burning heavenward. I remember once,
and once only, to have seen a spire in a narrow valley of a
mountainous country. The effect was not only mean but ludicrous, and
reminded me against my will of an extinguisher; the close
neighbourhood of the high mountain, at the foot of which it stood, had
so completely dwarfed it, and deprived it of all connection with the
sky or clouds. Forty-six English miles from Cuxhaven, and sixteen from
Hamburg, the Danish village Veder ornaments the left bank with its
black steeple, and close by it is the wild and pastoral hamlet of
Schulau. Hitherto both the right and left bank, green to the very
brink, and level with the river, resembled the shores of a park canal.
The trees and houses were alike low, sometimes the low trees over-
topping the yet lower houses, sometimes the low houses rising above
the yet lower trees. But at Schulau the left bank rises at once forty
or fifty feet, and stares on the river with its perpendicular facade
of sand, thinly patched with tufts of green. The Elbe continued to
present a more and more lively spectacle from the multitude of fishing
boats and the flocks of sea gulls wheeling round them, the clamorous
rivals and companions of the fishermen; till we came to Blankaness, a
most interesting village scattered amid scattered trees, over three
hills in three divisions. Each of the three hills stares upon the
river, with faces of bare sand, with which the boats with their bare
poles, standing in files along the banks, made a sort of fantastic
harmony. Between each facade lies a green and woody dell, each deeper
than the other. In short it is a large village made up of individual
cottages, each cottage in the centre of its own little wood or
orchard, and each with its own separate path: a village with a
labyrinth of paths, or rather a neighbourhood of houses! It is
inhabited by fishermen and boat-makers, the Blankanese boats being in
great request through the whole navigation of the Elbe. Here first we
saw the spires of Hamburg, and from hence, as far as Altona, the left
bank of the Elbe is uncommonly pleasing, considered as the vicinity of
an industrious and republican city--in that style of beauty, or rather
prettiness, that might tempt the citizen into the country, and yet
gratify the taste which he had acquired in the town. Summer-houses and
Chinese show-work are everywhere scattered along the high and green
banks; the boards of the farm-houses left unplastered and gaily
painted with green and yellow; and scarcely a tree not cut into shapes
and made to remind the human being of his own power and intelligence
instead of the wisdom of nature. Still, however, these are links of
connection between town and country, and far better than the
affectation of tastes and enjoyments for which men's habits have
disqualified them. Pass them by on Saturdays and Sundays with the
burghers of Hamburg smoking their pipes, the women and children
feasting in the alcoves of box and yew, and it becomes a nature of its
own. On Wednesday, four o'clock, we left the vessel, and passing with
trouble through the huge masses of shipping that seemed to choke the
wide Elbe from Altona upward, we were at length landed at the Boom
House, Hamburg.
LETTER II
To a lady.
RATZEBURG.
Meine liebe Freundinn,
See how natural the German comes from me, though I have not yet
been six weeks in the country!--almost as fluently as English from my
neighbour the Amtsschreiber, (or public secretary,) who as often as we
meet, though it should be half a dozen times in the same day, never
fails to greet me with--"---ddam your ploot unt eyes, my dearest
Englander! vhee goes it!"--which is certainly a proof of great
generosity on his part, these words being his whole stock of English.
I had, however, a better reason than the desire of displaying my
proficiency: for I wished to put you in good humour with a language,
from the acquirement of which I have promised myself much edification
and the means too of communicating a new pleasure to you and your
sister, during our winter readings. And how can I do this better than
by pointing out its gallant attention to the ladies? Our English
affix, ess, is, I believe, confined either to words derived from the
Latin, as actress, directress, etc., or from the French, as mistress,
duchess, and the like. But the German, inn, enables us to designate
the sex in every possible relation of life. Thus the Amtmann's lady is
the Frau Amtmanninn--the secretary's wife, (by the bye, the handsomest
woman I have yet seen in Germany,) is die allerliebste Frau
Amtsschreiberinn--the colonel's lady, die Frau Obristinn or
Colonellinn--and even the parson's wife, die Frau Pastorinn. But I am
especially pleased with their Freundinn, which, unlike the amica of
the Romans, is seldom used but in its best and purest sense. Now, I
know it will be said, that a friend is already something more than a
friend, when a man feels an anxiety to express to himself that this
friend is a female; but this I deny--in that sense at least in which
the objection will be made. I would hazard the impeachment of heresy,
rather than abandon my belief that there is a sex in our souls as well
as in their perishable garments; and he who does not feel it, never
truly loved a sister--nay, is not capable even of loving a wife as she
deserves to be loved, if she indeed be worthy of that holy name.
Now I know, my gentle friend, what you are murmuring to yourself--
"This is so like him! running away after the first bubble, that chance
has blown off from the surface of his fancy; when one is anxious to
learn where he is and what he has seen." Well then! that I am settled
at Ratzeburg, with my motives and the particulars of my journey
hither, will inform you. My first letter to him, with which doubtless
he has edified your whole fireside, left me safely landed at Hamburg
on the Elbe Stairs, at the Boom House. While standing on the stairs, I
was amused by the contents of the passage-boat. which crosses the
river once or twice a day from Hamburg to Haarburg. It was stowed
close with all people of all nations, in all sorts of dresses; the men
all with pipes in their mouths, and these pipes of all shapes and
fancies--straight and wreathed, simple and complex, long and short,
cane, clay, porcelain, wood, tin, silver, and ivory; most of them with
silver chains and silver bole-covers. Pipes and boots are the first
universal characteristic of the male Hamburgers that would strike the
eye of a raw traveller. But I forget my promise of journalizing as
much as possible.--Therefore, Septr. 19th Afternoon. My companion,
who, you recollect, speaks the French language with unusual propriety,
had formed a kind of confidential acquaintance with the emigrant, who
appeared to be a man of sense, and whose manners were those of a
perfect gentleman. He seemed about fifty or rather more. Whatever is
unpleasant in French manners from excess in the degree, had been
softened down by age or affliction; and all that is delightful in the
kind, alacrity and delicacy in little attentions, etc., remained, and
without bustle, gesticulation, or disproportionate eagerness. His
demeanour exhibited the minute philanthropy of a polished Frenchman,
tempered by the sobriety of the English character disunited from its
reserve. There is something strangely attractive in the character of a
gentleman when you apply the word emphatically, and yet in that sense
of the term which it is more easy to feel than to define. It neither
includes the possession of high moral excellence, nor of necessity
even the ornamental graces of manner. I have now in my mind's eye a
person whose life would scarcely stand scrutiny even in the court of
honour, much less in that of conscience; and his manners, if nicely
observed, would of the two excite an idea of awkwardness rather than
of elegance: and yet every one who conversed with him felt and
acknowledged the gentleman. The secret of the matter, I believe to be
this--we feel the gentlemanly character present to us, whenever, under
all the circumstances of social intercourse, the trivial not less than
the important, through the whole detail of his manners and deportment,
and with the ease of a habit, a person shows respect to others in such
a way, as at the same time implies in his own feelings an habitual and
assured anticipation of reciprocal respect from them to himself. In
short, the gentlemanly character arises out of the feeling of Equality
acting, as a Habit, yet flexible to the varieties of Rank, and
modified without being disturbed or superseded by them. This
description will perhaps explain to you the ground of one of your own
remarks, as I was englishing to you the interesting dialogue
concerning the causes of the corruption of eloquence. "What perfect
gentlemen these old Romans must have been! I was impressed, I
remember, with the same feeling at the time I was reading a
translation of Cicero's philosophical dialogues and of his epistolary
correspondence: while in Pliny's Letters I seemed to have a different
feeling--he gave me the notion of a very fine gentleman." You uttered
the words as if you had felt that the adjunct had injured the
substance and the increased degree altered the kind. Pliny was the
courtier of an absolute monarch--Cicero an aristocratic republican.
For this reason the character of gentleman, in the sense to which I
have confined it, is frequent in England, rare in France, and found,
where it is found, in age or the latest period of manhood; while in
Germany the character is almost unknown. But the proper antipode of a
gentleman is to be sought for among the Anglo-American democrats.
I owe this digression, as an act of justice to this amiable Frenchman,
and of humiliation for myself. For in a little controversy between us
on the subject of French poetry, he made me feel my own ill behaviour
by the silent reproof of contrast, and when I afterwards apologized to
him for the warmth of my language, he answered me with a cheerful
expression of surprise, and an immediate compliment, which a gentleman
might both make with dignity and receive with pleasure. I was pleased
therefore to find it agreed on, that we should, if possible, take up
our quarters in the same house. My friend went with him in search of
an hotel, and I to deliver my letters of recommendation.
I walked onward at a brisk pace, enlivened not so much by anything I
actually saw, as by the confused sense that I was for the first time
in my life on the continent of our planet. I seemed to myself like a
liberated bird that had been hatched in an aviary, who now, after his
first soar of freedom, poises himself in the upper air. Very naturally
I began to wonder at all things, some for being so like and some for
being so unlike the things in England--Dutch women with large umbrella
hats shooting out half a yard before them, with a prodigal plumpness
of petticoat behind--the women of Hamburg with caps plaited on the
caul with silver, or gold, or both, bordered round with stiffened
lace, which stood out before their eyes, but not lower, so that the
eyes sparkled through it--the Hanoverian with the fore part of the
head bare, then a stiff lace standing up like a wall perpendicular on
the cap, and the cap behind tailed with an enormous quantity of ribbon
which lies or tosses on the back:
"Their visnomies seem'd like a goodly banner
Spread in defiance of all enemies."
The ladies all in English dresses, all rouged, and all with bad teeth:
which you notice instantly from their contrast to the almost animal,
too glossy mother-of-pearl whiteness and the regularity of the teeth
of the laughing, loud-talking country-women and servant-girls, who
with their clean white stockings and with slippers without heel
quarters, tripped along the dirty streets, as if they were secured by
a charm from the dirt: with a lightness too, which surprised me, who
had always considered it as one of the annoyances of sleeping in an
Inn, that I had to clatter up stairs in a pair of them. The streets
narrow; to my English nose sufficiently offensive, and explaining at
first sight the universal use of boots; without any appropriate path
for the foot-passengers; the gable ends of the houses all towards the
street, some in the ordinary triangular form and entire as the
botanists say; but the greater number notched and scolloped with more
than Chinese grotesqueness. Above all, I was struck with the profusion
of windows, so large and so many, that the houses look all glass. Mr.
Pitt's window tax, with its pretty little additionals sprouting out
from it like young toadlets on the back of a Surinam toad, would
certainly improve the appearance of the Hamburg houses, which have a
slight summer look, not in keeping with their size, incongruous with
the climate, and precluding that feeling of retirement and self-
content, which one wishes to associate with a house in a noisy city.
But a conflagration would, I fear, be the previous requisite to the
production of any architectural beauty in Hamburg: for verily it is a
filthy town. I moved on and crossed a multitude of ugly bridges, with
huge black deformities of water wheels close by them. The water
intersects the city everywhere, and would have furnished to the genius
of Italy the capabilities of all that is most beautiful and
magnificent in architecture. It might have been the rival of Venice,
and it is huddle and ugliness, stench and stagnation. The Jungfer
Stieg, (that is, Young Ladies' Walk), to which my letters directed me,
made an exception. It was a walk or promenade planted with treble rows
of elm trees, which, being yearly pruned and cropped, remain slim and
dwarf-like. This walk occupies one side of a square piece of water,
with many swans on it perfectly tame, and, moving among the swans,
shewy pleasure-boats with ladies in them, rowed by their husbands or
lovers.------
(Some paragraphs have been here omitted.)------thus embarrassed by sad
and solemn politeness still more than by broken English, it sounded
like the voice of an old friend when I heard the emigrant's servant
inquiring after me. He had come for the purpose of guiding me to our
hotel. Through streets and streets I pressed on as happy as a child,
and, I doubt not, with a childish expression of wonderment in my busy
eyes, amused by the wicker waggons with movable benches across them,
one behind the other, (these were the hackney coaches amused by the
sign-boards of the shops, on which all the articles sold within are
painted, and that too very exactly, though in a grotesque confusion,
(a useful substitute for language in this great mart of nations
amused with the incessant tinkling of the shop and house door bells,
the bell hanging over each door and struck with a small iron rod at
every entrance and exit;--and finally, amused by looking in at the
windows, as I passed along; the ladies and gentlemen drinking coffee
or playing cards, and the gentlemen all smoking. I wished myself a
painter, that I might have sent you a sketch of one of the card
parties. The long pipe of one gentleman rested on the table, its bole
half a yard from his mouth, fuming like a censer by the fish-pool--the
other gentleman, who was dealing the cards, and of course had both
hands employed, held his pipe in his teeth, which hanging down between
his knees, smoked beside his ancles. Hogarth himself never drew a more
ludicrous distortion both of attitude and physiognomy, than this
effort occasioned nor was there wanting beside it one of those
beautiful female faces which the same Hogarth, in whom the satirist
never extinguished that love of beauty which belonged to him as a
poet, so often and so gladly introduces, as the central figure, in a
crowd of humorous deformities, which figures, (such is the power of
true genius!) neither acts, nor is meant to act as a contrast; but
diffuses through all, and over each of the group, a spirit of
reconciliation and human kindness; and, even when the attention is no
longer consciously directed to the cause of this feeling, still blends
its tenderness with our laughter: and thus prevents the instructive
merriment at the whims of nature or the foibles or humours of our
fellow-men from degenerating into the heart-poison of contempt or
hatred.
Our hotel DIE WILDE MAN, (the sign of which was no bad likeness of the
landlord, who had ingrafted on a very grim face a restless grin, that
was at every man's service, and which indeed, like an actor rehearsing
to himself, he kept playing in expectation of an occasion for it)--
neither our hotel, I say, nor its landlord were of the genteelest
class. But it has one great advantage for a stranger, by being in the
market place, and the next neighbour of the huge church of St.
Nicholas: a church with shops and houses built up against it, out of
which wens and warts its high massy steeple rises, necklaced near the
top with a round of large gilt balls. A better pole-star could
scarcely be desired. Long shall I retain the impression made on my
mind by the awful echo, so loud and long and tremulous, of the deep-
toned clock within this church, which awoke me at two in the morning
from a distressful dream, occasioned, I believe, by the feather bed,
which is used here instead of bed-clothes. I will rather carry my
blanket about with me like a wild Indian, than submit to this
abominable custom. Our emigrant acquaintance was, we found, an
intimate friend of the celebrated Abbe de Lisle: and from the large
fortune which he possessed under the monarchy, had rescued sufficient
not only for independence, but for respectability. He had offended
some of his fellow-emigrants in London, whom he had obliged with
considerable sums, by a refusal to make further advances, and in
consequence of their intrigues had received an order to quit the
kingdom. I thought it one proof of his innocence, that he attached no
blame either to the alien act, or to the minister who had exerted it
against him; and a still greater, that he spoke of London with
rapture, and of his favourite niece, who had married and settled in
England, with all the fervour and all the pride of a fond parent. A
man sent by force out of a country, obliged to sell out of the stocks
at a great loss, and exiled from those pleasures and that style of
society which habit had rendered essential to his happiness, whose
predominant feelings were yet all of a private nature, resentment for
friendship outraged, and anguish for domestic affections interrupted--
such a man, I think, I could dare warrant guiltless of espionnage in
any service, most of all in that of the present French Directory. He
spoke with ecstasy of Paris under the Monarchy: and yet the particular
facts, which made up his description, left as deep a conviction on my
mind, of French worthlessness, as his own tale had done of emigrant
ingratitude. Since my arrival in Germany, I have not met a single
person, even among those who abhor the Revolution, that spoke with
favour, or even charity of the French emigrants. Though the belief of
their influence in the organization of this disastrous war (from the
horrors of which, North Germany deems itself only reprieved, not
secured,) may have some share in the general aversion with which they
are regarded: yet I am deeply persuaded that the far greater part is
owing to their own profligacy, to their treachery and hardheartedness
to each other, and the domestic misery or corrupt principles which so
many of them have carried into the families of their protectors. My
heart dilated with honest pride, as I recalled to mind the stern yet
amiable characters of the English patriots, who sought refuge on the
Continent at the Restoration! O let not our civil war under the first
Charles be paralleled with the French Revolution! In the former, the
character overflowed from excess of principle; in the latter from the
fermentation of the dregs! The former, was a civil war between the
virtues and virtuous prejudices of the two parties; the latter,
between the vices. The Venetian glass of the French monarchy shivered
and flew asunder with the working of a double poison.
Sept. 20th.  I was introduced to Mr. Klopstock, the brother of the
poet, who again introduced me to Professor Ebeling, an intelligent and
lively man, though deaf: so deaf, indeed, that it was a painful effort
to talk with him, as we were obliged to drop our pearls into a huge
ear-trumpet. From this courteous and kind-hearted man of letters, (I
hope, the German literati in general may resemble this first
specimen), I heard a tolerable Italian pun, and an interesting
anecdote. When Buonaparte was in Italy, having been irritated by some
instance of perfidy, he said in a loud and vehement tone, in a public
company--"'tis a true proverb, gli Italiani tutti ladroni"--(that is,
the Italians all plunderers.) A lady had the courage to reply, "Non
tutti; ma BUONA PARTE," (not all, but a good part, or Buonaparte.)
This, I confess, sounded to my ears, as one of the many good things
that might have been said. The anecdote is more valuable; for it
instances the ways and means of French insinuation. Hoche had received
much information concerning the face of the country from a map of
unusual fulness and accuracy, the maker of which, he heard, resided at
Duesseldorf. At the storming of Duesseldorf by the French army, Hoche
previously ordered, that the house and property of this man should be
preserved, and intrusted the performance of the order to an officer on
whose troop he could rely. Finding afterwards, that the man had
escaped before the storming commenced, Hoche exclaimed, "HE had no
reason to flee! It is for such men, not against them, that the French
nation makes war, and consents to shed the blood of its children." You
remember Milton's sonnet--
"The great Emathian conqueror bid spare
The house of Pindarus when temple and tower
Went to the ground"------
Now though the Duesseldorf map-maker may stand in the same relation to
the Theban bard, as the snail, that marks its path by lines of film on
the wall it creeps over, to the eagle that soars sunward and beats the
tempest with its wings; it does not therefore follow, that the Jacobin
of France may not be as valiant a general and as good a politician, as
the madman of Macedon.
From Professor Ebeling's Mr. Klopstock accompanied my friend and me to
his own house, where I saw a fine bust of his brother. There was a
solemn and heavy greatness in his countenance, which corresponded to
my preconceptions of his style and genius.--I saw there, likewise, a
very fine portrait of Lessing, whose works are at present the chief
object of my admiration. His eyes were uncommonly like mine, if
anything, rather larger and more prominent. But the lower part of his
face and his nose--O what an exquisite expression of elegance and
sensibility!--There appeared no depth, weight, or comprehensiveness in
the forehead.--The whole face seemed to say, that Lessing was a man of
quick and voluptuous feelings; of an active but light fancy; acute;
yet acute not in the observation of actual life, but in the
arrangements and management of the ideal world, that is, in taste, and
in metaphysics. I assure you, that I wrote these very words in my
memorandum-book with the portrait before my eyes, and when I knew
nothing of Lessing but his name, and that he was a German writer of
eminence.
We consumed two hours and more over a bad dinner, at the table d'hote.
"Patience at a German ordinary, smiling at time." The Germans are the
worst cooks in Europe. There is placed for every two persons a bottle
of common wine--Rhenish and Claret alternately; but in the houses of
the opulent, during the many and long intervals of the dinner, the
servants hand round glasses of richer wines. At the Lord of Culpin's
they came in this order. Burgundy--Madeira--Port--Frontiniac--
Pacchiaretti--Old Hock--Mountain--Champagne--Hock again--Bishop, and
lastly, Punch. A tolerable quantum, methinks! The last dish at the
ordinary, viz. slices of roast pork, (for all the larger dishes are
brought in, cut up, and first handed round and then set on the table,)
with stewed prunes and other sweet fruits, and this followed by cheese
and butter, with plates of apples, reminded me of Shakespeare [76],
and Shakespeare put it in my head to go to the French comedy.
Bless me! why it is worse than our modern English plays! The first act
informed me, that a court martial is to be held on a Count Vatron, who
had drawn his sword on the Colonel, his brother-in-law. The officers
plead in his behalf--in vain! His wife, the Colonel's sister, pleads
with most tempestuous agonies--in vain! She falls into hysterics and
faints away, to the dropping of the inner curtain! In the second act
sentence of death is passed on the Count--his wife, as frantic and
hysterical as before: more so (good industrious creature!) she could
not be. The third and last act, the wife still frantic, very frantic
indeed!--the soldiers just about to fire, the handkerchief actually
dropped; when reprieve! reprieve! is heard from behind the scenes: and
in comes Prince Somebody, pardons the Count, and the wife is still
frantic, only with joy; that was all!
O dear lady! this is one of the cases, in which laughter is followed
by melancholy: for such is the kind of drama, which is now substituted
every where for Shakespeare and Racine. You well know, that I offer
violence to my own feelings in joining these names. But however meanly
I may think of the French serious drama, even in its most perfect
specimens; and with whatever right I may complain of its perpetual
falsification of the language, and of the connections and transitions
of thought, which Nature has appropriated to states of passion; still,
however, the French tragedies are consistent works of art, and the
offspring of great intellectual power. Preserving a fitness in the
parts, and a harmony in the whole, they form a nature of their own,
though a false nature. Still they excite the minds of the spectators
to active thought, to a striving after ideal excellence. The soul is
not stupefied into mere sensations by a worthless sympathy with our
own ordinary sufferings, or an empty curiosity for the surprising,
undignified by the language or the situations which awe and delight
the imagination. What, (I would ask of the crowd, that press forward
to the pantomimic tragedies and weeping comedies of Kotzebue and his
imitators), what are you seeking? Is it comedy? But in the comedy of
Shakespeare and Moliere the more accurate my knowledge, and the more
profoundly I think, the greater is the satisfaction that mingles with
my laughter. For though the qualities which these writers pourtray are
ludicrous indeed, either from the kind or the excess, and exquisitely
ludicrous, yet are they the natural growth of the human mind and such
as, with more or less change in the drapery, I can apply to my own
heart, or at least to whole classes of my fellow-creatures. How often
are not the moralist and the metaphysician obliged for the happiest
illustrations of general truths and the subordinate laws of human
thought and action to quotations, not only from the tragic characters,
but equally from the Jaques, Falstaff, and even from the fools and
clowns of Shakespeare, or from the Miser, Hypochondriast, and
Hypocrite, of Moliere! Say not, that I am recommending abstractions:
for these class-characteristics, which constitute the instructiveness
of a character, are so modified and particularized in each person of
the Shakesperian Drama, that life itself does not excite more
distinctly that sense of individuality which belongs to real
existence. Paradoxical as it may sound, one of the essential
properties of geometry is not less essential to dramatic excellence,
and, (if I may mention his name without pedantry to a lady,) Aristotle
has accordingly required of the poet an involution of the universal in
the individual. The chief differences are, that in geometry it is the
universal truth itself, which is uppermost in the consciousness, in
poetry the individual form in which the truth is clothed. With the
ancients, and not less with the elder dramatists of England and
France, both comedy and tragedy were considered as kinds of poetry.
They neither sought in comedy to make us laugh merely, much less to
make us laugh by wry faces, accidents of jargon, slang phrases for the
day, or the clothing of commonplace morals in metaphors drawn from the
shops or mechanic occupations of their characters; nor did they
condescend in tragedy to wheedle away the applause of the spectators,
by representing before them fac-similes of their own mean selves in
all their existing meanness, or to work on their sluggish sympathies
by a pathos not a whit more respectable than the maudlin tears of
drunkenness. Their tragic scenes were meant to affect us indeed, but
within the bounds of pleasure, and in union with the activity both of
our understanding and imagination. They wished to transport the mind
to a sense of its possible greatness, and to implant the germs of that
greatness during the temporary oblivion of the worthless "thing, we
are" and of the peculiar state, in which each man happens to be;
suspending our individual recollections and lulling them to sleep amid
the music of nobler thoughts.
Hold!--(methinks I hear the spokesman of the crowd reply, and we will
listen to him. I am the plaintiff, and he the defendant.)
DEFENDANT.  Hold! are not our modern sentimental plays filled with the
best Christian morality?
PLAINTIFF.  Yes! just as much of it, and just that part of it, which
you can exercise without a single Christian virtue--without a single
sacrifice that is really painful to you!--just as much as flatters
you, sends you away pleased with your own hearts, and quite reconciled
to your vices, which can never be thought very ill of, when they keep
such good company, and walk hand in hand with so much compassion and
generosity; adulation so loathsome, that you would spit in the man's
face who dared offer it to you in a private company, unless you
interpreted it as insulting irony, you appropriate with infinite
satisfaction, when you share the garbage with the whole stye, and
gobble it out of a common trough. No Caesar must pace your boards--no
Antony, no royal Dane, no Orestes, no Andromache!
D.  No: or as few of them as possible. What has a plain citizen of
London, or Hamburg, to do with your kings and queens, and your old
school-boy Pagan heroes? Besides, every body knows the stories; and
what curiosity can we feel----
P.  What, Sir, not for the manner?--not for the delightful language of
the poet?--not for the situations, the action and reaction of the
passions?
D.  You are hasty, Sir! the only curiosity, we feel, is in the story:
and how can we be anxious concerning the end of a play, or be
surprised by it, when we know how it will turn out?
P.  Your pardon, for having interrupted you! we now understand each
other. You seek then, in a tragedy, which wise men of old held for the
highest effort of human genius, the same gratification, as that you
receive from a new novel, the last German romance, and other dainties
of the day, which can be enjoyed but once. If you carry these feelings
to the sister art of Painting, Michael Angelo's Sixtine Chapel, and
the Scripture Gallery of Raphael can expect no favour from you. You
know all about them beforehand; and are, doubtless, more familiar with
the subjects of those paintings, than with the tragic tales of the
historic or heroic ages. There is a consistency, therefore, in your
preference of contemporary writers: for the great men of former times,
those at least who were deemed great by our ancestors, sought so
little to gratify this kind of curiosity, that they seemed to have
regarded the story in a not much higher light, than the painter
regards his canvass: as that on, not by, which they were to display
their appropriate excellence. No work, resembling a tale or romance,
can well show less variety of invention in the incidents, or less
anxiety in weaving them together, than the DON QUIXOTE of Cervantes.
Its admirers feel the disposition to go back and re-peruse some
preceding chapter, at least ten times for once that they find any
eagerness to hurry forwards: or open the book on those parts which
they best recollect, even as we visit those friends oftenest whom we
love most, and with whose characters and actions we are the most
intimately acquainted. In the divine Ariosto, (as his countrymen call
this, their darling poet,) I question whether there be a single tale
of his own invention, or the elements of which, were not familiar to
the readers of "old romance." I will pass by the ancient Greeks, who
thought it even necessary to the fable of a tragedy, that its
substance should be previously known. That there had been at least
fifty tragedies with the same title, would be one of the motives which
determined Sophocles and Euripides, in the choice of Electra as a
subject. But Milton--
D.  Aye Milton, indeed!--but do not Dr. Johnson and other great men
tell us, that nobody now reads Milton but as a task?
P.  So much the worse for them, of whom this can be truly said! But
why then do you pretend to admire Shakespeare? The greater part, if
not all, of his dramas were, as far as the names and the main
incidents are concerned, already stock plays. All the stories, at
least, on which they are built, pre-existed in the chronicles,
ballads, or translations of contemporary or preceding English writers.
Why, I repeat, do you pretend to admire Shakespeare? Is it, perhaps,
that you only pretend to admire him? However, as once for all, you
have dismissed the well-known events and personages of history, or the
epic muse, what have you taken in their stead? Whom has your tragic
muse armed with her bowl and dagger? the sentimental muse I should
have said, whom you have seated in the throne of tragedy? What heroes
has she reared on her buskins?
D.  O! our good friends and next-door neighbours--honest tradesmen,
valiant tars, high-spirited half-pay officers, philanthropic Jews,
virtuous courtezans, tender-hearted braziers, and sentimental rat-
catchers!--(a little bluff or so, but all our very generous, tender-
hearted characters are a little rude or misanthropic, and all our
misanthropes very tender-hearted.)
P.  But I pray you, friend, in what actions great or interesting, can
such men be engaged?
D.  They give away a great deal of money; find rich dowries for young
men and maidens who have all other good qualities; they brow-beat
lords, baronets, and justices of the peace, (for they are as bold as
Hector!)--they rescue stage coaches at the instant they are falling
down precipices; carry away infants in the sight of opposing armies;
and some of our performers act a muscular able-bodied man to such
perfection, that our dramatic poets, who always have the actors in
their eye, seldom fail to make their favourite male character as
strong as Samson. And then they take such prodigious leaps!! And what
is done on the stage is more striking even than what is acted. I once
remember such a deafening explosion, that I could not hear a word of
the play for half an act after it: and a little real gunpowder being
set fire to at the same time, and smelt by all the spectators, the
naturalness of the scene was quite astonishing!
P.  But how can you connect with such men and such actions that
dependence of thousands on the fate of one, which gives so lofty an
interest to the personages of Shakespeare, and the Greek Tragedians?
How can you connect with them that sublimest of all feelings, the
power of destiny and the controlling might of heaven, which seems to
elevate the characters which sink beneath its irresistible blow?
D.  O mere fancies! We seek and find on the present stage our own
wants and passions, our own vexations, losses, and embarrassments.
P.  It is your own poor pettifogging nature then, which you desire to
have represented before you?--not human nature in its height and
vigour? But surely you might find the former with all its joys and
sorrows, more conveniently in your own houses and parishes.
D.  True! but here comes a difference. Fortune is blind, but the poet
has his eyes open, and is besides as complaisant as fortune is
capricious. He makes every thing turn out exactly as we would wish it.
He gratifies us by representing those as hateful or contemptible whom
we hate and wish to despise.
P.  (aside.) That is, he gratifies your envy by libelling your
superiors.
D.  He makes all those precise moralists, who affect to be better than
their neighbours, turn out at last abject hypocrites, traitors, and
hard-hearted villains; and your men of spirit, who take their girl and
their glass with equal freedom, prove the true men of honour, and,
(that no part of the audience may remain unsatisfied,) reform in the
last scene, and leave no doubt in the minds of the ladies, that they
will make most faithful and excellent husbands: though it does seem a
pity, that they should be obliged to get rid of qualities which had
made them so interesting! Besides, the poor become rich all at once;
and in the final matrimonial choice the opulent and high-born
themselves are made to confess; that VIRTUE IS THE ONLY TRUE NOBILITY,
AND THAT A LOVELY WOMAN IS A DOWRY OF HERSELF!!
P.  Excellent! But you have forgotten those brilliant flashes of
loyalty, those patriotic praises of the King and Old England, which,
especially if conveyed in a metaphor from the ship or the shop, so
often solicit and so unfailingly receive the public plaudit! I give
your prudence credit for the omission. For the whole system of your
drama is a moral and intellectual Jacobinism of the most dangerous
kind, and those common-place rants of loyalty are no better than
hypocrisy in your playwrights, and your own sympathy with them a gross
self-delusion. For the whole secret of dramatic popularity consists
with you in the confusion and subversion of the natural order of
things, their causes and their effects; in the excitement of surprise,
by representing the qualities of liberality, refined feeling, and a
nice sense of honour, (those things rather which pass among you for
such), in persons and in classes of life where experience teaches us
least to expect them; and in rewarding with all the sympathies, that
are the dues of virtue, those criminals whom law, reason, and religion
have excommunicated from our esteem!
And now--good night! Truly! I might have written this last sheet
without having gone to Germany; but I fancied myself talking to you by
your own fireside, and can you think it a small pleasure to me to
forget now and then, that I am not there? Besides, you and my other
good friends have made up your minds to me as I am, and from whatever
place I write you will expect that part of my "Travels" will consist
of excursions in my own mind.
LETTER III
RATZEBURG.
No little fish thrown back again into the water, no fly unimprisoned
from a child's hand, could more buoyantly enjoy its element, than I
this clean and peaceful house, with this lovely view of the town,
groves, and lake of Ratzeburg, from the window at which I am writing.
My spirits certainly, and my health I fancied, were beginning to sink
under the noise, dirt, and unwholesome air of our Hamburg hotel. I
left it on Sunday, Sept. 23rd, with a letter of introduction from the
poet Klopstock, to the Amtmann of Ratzeburg. The Amtmann received me
with kindness, and introduced me to the worthy pastor, who agreed to
board and lodge me for any length of time not less than a month. The
vehicle, in which I took my place, was considerably larger than an
English stage-coach, to which it bore much the same proportion and
rude resemblance, that an elephant's ear does to the human. Its top
was composed of naked boards of different colours, and seeming to have
been parts of different wainscots. Instead of windows there were
leathern curtains with a little eye of glass in each: they perfectly
answered the purpose of keeping out the prospect and letting in the
cold. I could observe little therefore, but the inns and farmhouses at
which we stopped. They were all alike, except in size: one great room,
like a barn, with a hay-loft over it, the straw and hay dangling in
tufts through the boards which formed the ceiling of the room, and the
floor of the loft. From this room, which is paved like a street,
sometimes one, sometimes two smaller ones, are enclosed at one end.
These are commonly floored. In the large room the cattle, pigs,
poultry, men, women, and children, live in amicable community; yet
there was an appearance of cleanliness and rustic comfort. One of
these houses I measured. It was an hundred feet in length. The
apartments were taken off from one corner. Between these and the
stalls there was a small interspace, and here the breadth was forty-
eight feet, but thirty-two where the stalls were; of course, the
stalls were on each side eight feet in depth. The faces of the cows,
etc. were turned towards the room; indeed they were in it, so that
they had at least the comfort of seeing each other's faces. Stall-
feeding is universal in this part of Germany, a practice concerning
which the agriculturist and the poet are likely to entertain opposite
opinions--or at least, to have very different feelings. The woodwork
of these buildings on the outside is left unplastered, as in old
houses among us, and, being painted red and green, it cuts and
tesselates the buildings very gaily. From within three miles of
Hamburg almost to Molln, which is thirty miles from it, the country,
as far as I could see it, was a dead flat, only varied by woods. At
Molln it became more beautiful. I observed a small lake nearly
surrounded with groves, and a palace in view belonging to the King of
Great Britain, and inhabited by the Inspector of the Forests. We were
nearly the same time in travelling the thirty-five miles from Hamburg
to Ratzeburg, as we had been in going from London to Yarmouth, one
hundred and twenty-six miles.
The lake of Ratzeburg runs from south to north, about nine miles in
length, and varying in breadth from three miles to half a mile. About
a mile from the southernmost point it is divided into two, of course
very unequal, parts by an island, which, being connected by a bridge
and a narrow slip of land with the one shore, and by another bridge of
immense length with the other shore, forms a complete isthmus. On this
island the town of Ratzeburg is built. The pastor's house or vicarage,
together with the Amtmann's Amtsschreiber's, and the church, stands
near the summit of a hill, which slopes down to the slip of land and
the little bridge, from which, through a superb military gate, you
step into the island-town of Ratzeburg. This again is itself a little
hill, by ascending and descending which, you arrive at the long
bridge, and so to the other shore. The water to the south of the town
is called the Little Lake, which however almost engrosses the beauties
of the whole the shores being just often enough green and bare to give
the proper effect to the magnificent groves which occupy the greater
part of their circumference. From the turnings, windings, and
indentations of the shore, the views vary almost every ten steps, and
the whole has a sort of majestic beauty, a feminine grandeur. At the
north of the Great Lake, and peeping over it, I see the seven church
towers of Luebec, at the distance of twelve or thirteen miles, yet as
distinctly as if they were not three. The only defect in the view is,
that Ratzeburg is built entirely of red bricks, and all the houses
roofed with red tiles. To the eye, therefore, it presents a clump of
brick-dust red. Yet this evening, Oct. 10th, twenty minutes past five,
I saw the town perfectly beautiful, and the whole softened down into
complete keeping, if I may borrow a term from the painters. The sky
over Ratzeburg and all the east was a pure evening blue, while over
the west it was covered with light sandy clouds. Hence a deep red
light spread over the whole prospect, in undisturbed harmony with the
red town, the brown-red woods, and the yellow-red reeds on the skirts
of the lake. Two or three boats, with single persons paddling them,
floated up and down in the rich light, which not only was itself in
harmony with all, but brought all into harmony.
I should have told you that I went back to Hamburg on Thursday (Sept.
27th) to take leave of my friend, who travels southward, and returned
hither on the Monday following. From Empfelde, a village half way from
Ratzeburg, I walked to Hamburg through deep sandy roads and a dreary
flat: the soil everywhere white, hungry, and excessively pulverised;
but the approach to the city is pleasing. Light cool country houses,
which you can look through and see the gardens behind them, with
arbours and trellis work, and thick vegetable walls, and trees in
cloisters and piazzas, each house with neat rails before it, and green
seats within the rails. Every object, whether the growth of nature or
the work of man, was neat and artificial. It pleased me far better,
than if the houses and gardens, and pleasure fields, had been in a
nobler taste: for this nobler taste would have been mere apery. The
busy, anxious, money-loving merchant of Hamburg could only have
adopted, he could not have enjoyed the simplicity of nature. The mind
begins to love nature by imitating human conveniences in nature; but
this is a step in intellect, though a low one--and were it not so, yet
all around me spoke of innocent enjoyment and sensitive comforts, and
I entered with unscrupulous sympathy into the enjoyments and comforts
even of the busy, anxious, money-loving merchants of Hamburg. In this
charitable and catholic mood I reached the vast ramparts of the city.
These are huge green cushions, one rising above the other, with trees
growing in the interspaces, pledges and symbols of a long peace. Of my
return I have nothing worth communicating, except that I took extra
post, which answers to posting in England. These north German post
chaises are uncovered wicker carts. An English dust-cart is a piece of
finery, a chef d'auvre of mechanism, compared with them and the
horses!--a savage might use their ribs instead of his fingers for a
numeration table. Wherever we stopped, the postilion fed his cattle
with the brown rye bread of which he eat himself, all breakfasting
together; only the horses had no gin to their water, and the postilion
no water to his gin. Now and henceforward for subjects of more
interest to you, and to the objects in search of which I left you:
namely, the literati and literature of Germany.
Believe me, I walked with an impression of awe on my spirits, as W----
and myself accompanied Mr. Klopstock to the house of his brother, the
poet, which stands about a quarter of a mile from the city gate. It is
one of a row of little common-place summer-houses, (for so they
looked,) with four or five rows of young meagre elm trees before the
windows, beyond which is a green, and then a dead flat intersected
with several roads. Whatever beauty, (thought I,) may be before the
poet's eyes at present, it must certainly be purely of his own
creation. We waited a few minutes in a neat little parlour, ornamented
with the figures of two of the Muses and with prints, the subjects of
which were from Klopstock's odes. The poet entered. I was much
disappointed in his countenance, and recognised in it no likeness to
the bust. There was no comprehension in the forehead, no weight over
the eye-brows, no expression of peculiarity, moral or intellectual, on
the eyes, no massiveness in the general countenance. He is, if
anything, rather below the middle size. He wore very large half-boots,
which his legs filled, so fearfully were they swollen. However, though
neither W---- nor myself could discover any indications of sublimity
or enthusiasm in his physiognomy, we were both equally impressed with
his liveliness, and his kind and ready courtesy. He talked in French
with my friend, and with difficulty spoke a few sentences to me in
English. His enunciation was not in the least affected by the entire
want of his upper teeth. The conversation began on his part by the
expression of his rapture at the surrender of the detachment of French
troops under General Humbert. Their proceedings in Ireland with regard
to the committee which they had appointed, with the rest of their
organizing system, seemed to have given the poet great entertainment.
He then declared his sanguine belief in Nelson's victory, and
anticipated its confirmation with a keen and triumphant pleasure. His
words, tones, looks, implied the most vehement Anti-Gallicanism. The
subject changed to literature, and I inquired in Latin concerning the
history of German poetry and the elder German poets. To my great
astonishment he confessed, that he knew very little on the subject. He
had indeed occasionally read one or two of their elder writers, but
not so as to enable him to speak of their merits. Professor Ebeling,
he said, would probably give me every information of this kind: the
subject had not particularly excited his curiosity. He then talked of
Milton and Glover, and thought Glover's blank verse superior to
Milton's. W---- and myself expressed our surprise: and my friend gave
his definition and notion of harmonious verse, that it consisted, (the
English iambic blank verse above all,) in the apt arrangement of
pauses and cadences, and the sweep of whole paragraphs,
"with many a winding bout
Of linked sweetness long drawn out,"
and not in the even flow, much less in the prominence of antithetic
vigour, of single lines, which were indeed injurious to the total
effect, except where they were introduced for some specific purpose.
Klopstock assented, and said that he meant to confine Glover's
superiority to single lines. He told us that he had read Milton, in a
prose translation, when he was fourteen [77]. I understood him thus
myself, and W---- interpreted Klopstock's French as I had already
construed it. He appeared to know very little of Milton or indeed of
our poets in general. He spoke with great indignation of the English
prose translation of his MESSIAH. All the translations had been bad,
very bad--but the English was no translation--there were pages on
pages not in the original--and half the original was not to be found
in the translation. W---- told him that I intended to translate a few
of his odes as specimens of German lyrics--he then said to me in
English, "I wish you would render into English some select passages of
THE MESSIAH, and revenge me of your countryman!". It was the liveliest
thing which he produced in the whole conversation. He told us, that
his first ode was fifty years older than his last. I looked at him
with much emotion--I considered him as the venerable father of German
poetry; as a good man; as a Christian; seventy-four years old; with
legs enormously swollen; yet active, lively, cheerful, and kind, and
communicative. My eyes felt as if a tear were swelling into them. In
the portrait of Lessing there was a toupee periwig, which enormously
injured the effect of his physiognomy--Klopstock wore the same,
powdered and frizzled. By the bye, old men ought never to wear powder
--the contrast between a large snow-white wig and the colour of an old
man's skin is disgusting, and wrinkles in such a neighbourhood appear
only channels for dirt. It is an honour to poets and great men, that
you think of them as parts of nature; and anything of trick and
fashion wounds you in them, as much as when you see venerable yews
clipped into miserable peacocks.--The author of THE MESSIAH should
have worn his own grey hair.--His powder and periwig were to the eye
what Mr. Virgil would be to the ear.
Klopstock dwelt much on the superior power which the German language
possessed of concentrating meaning. He said, he had often translated
parts of Homer and Virgil, line by line, and a German line proved
always sufficient for a Greek or Latin one. In English you cannot do
this. I answered, that in English we could commonly render one Greek
heroic line in a line and a half of our common heroic metre, and I
conjectured that this line and a half would be found to contain no
more syllables than one German or Greek hexameter. He did not
understand me [78]: and I, who wished to hear his opinions, not to
correct them, was glad that he did not.
We now took our leave. At the beginning of the French Revolution
Klopstock wrote odes of congratulation. He received some honorary
presents from the French Republic, (a golden crown I believe), and,
like our Priestley, was invited to a seat in the legislature, which he
declined. But when French liberty metamorphosed herself into a fury,
he sent back these presents with a palinodia, declaring his abhorrence
of their proceedings: and since then he has been perhaps more than
enough an Anti-Gallican. I mean, that in his just contempt and
detestation of the crimes and follies of the Revolutionists, he
suffers himself to forget that the revolution itself is a process of
the Divine Providence; and that as the folly of men is the wisdom of
God, so are their iniquities instruments of his goodness. From
Klopstock's house we walked to the ramparts, discoursing together on
the poet and his conversation, till our attention was diverted to the
beauty and singularity of the sunset and its effects on the objects
around us. There were woods in the distance. A rich sandy light, (nay,
of a much deeper colour than sandy,) lay over these woods that
blackened in the blaze. Over that part of the woods which lay
immediately under the intenser light, a brassy mist floated. The trees
on the ramparts, and the people moving to and fro between them, were
cut or divided into equal segments of deep shade and brassy light. Had
the trees, and the bodies of the men and women, been divided into
equal segments by a rule or pair of compasses, the portions could not
have been more regular. All else was obscure. It was a fairy scene!--
and to increase its romantic character, among the moving objects, thus
divided into alternate shade and brightness, was a beautiful child,
dressed with the elegant simplicity of an English child, riding on a
stately goat, the saddle, bridle, and other accoutrements of which
were in a high degree costly and splendid. Before I quit the subject
of Hamburg, let me say, that I remained a day or two longer than I
otherwise should have done, in order to be present at the feast of St.
Michael, the patron saint of Hamburg, expecting to see the civic pomp
of this commercial Republic. I was however disappointed. There were no
processions, two or three sermons were preached to two or three old
women in two or three churches, and St. Michael and his patronage
wished elsewhere by the higher classes, all places of entertainment,
theatre, etc. being shut up on this day. In Hamburg, there seems to be
no religion at all; in Luebec it is confined to the women. The men
seemed determined to be divorced from their wives in the other world,
if they cannot in this. You will not easily conceive a more singular
sight, than is presented by the vast aisle of the principal church at
Luebec, seen from the organ loft: for being filled with female
servants and persons in the same class of life, and all their caps
having gold and silver cauls, it appears like a rich pavement of gold
and silver.
I will conclude this letter with the mere transcription of notes,
which my friend W---- made of his conversations with Klopstock, during
the interviews that took place after my departure. On these I shall
make but one remark at present, and that will appear a presumptuous
one, namely, that Klopstock's remarks on the venerable sage of
Koenigsburg are to my own knowledge injurious and mistaken; and so far
is it from being true, that his system is now given up, that
throughout the Universities of Germany there is not a single professor
who is not either a Kantean or a disciple of Fichte, whose system is
built on the Kantean, and presupposes its truth; or lastly who, though
an antagonist of Kant, as to his theoretical work, has not embraced
wholly or in part his moral system, and adopted part of his
nomenclature. "Klopstock having wished to see the CALVARY of
Cumberland, and asked what was thought of it in England, I went to
Remnant's (the English bookseller) where I procured the Analytical
Review, in which is contained the review of Cumberland's CALVARY. I
remembered to have read there some specimens of a blank verse
translation of THE MESSIAH. I had mentioned this to Klopstock, and he
had a great desire to see them. I walked over to his house and put the
book into his hands. On adverting to his own poem, he told me he began
THE MESSIAH when he was seventeen; he devoted three entire years to
the plan without composing a single line. He was greatly at a loss in
what manner to execute his work. There were no successful specimens of
versification in the German language before this time. The first three
cantos he wrote in a species of measured or numerous prose. This,
though done with much labour and some success, was far from satisfying
him. He had composed hexameters both Latin and Greek as a school
exercise, and there had been also in the German language attempts in
that style of versification. These were only of very moderate merit.--
One day he was struck with the idea of what could be done in this way
--he kept his room a whole day, even went without his dinner, and found
that in the evening he had written twenty-three hexameters, versifying
a part of what he had before written in prose. From that time, pleased
with his efforts, he composed no more in prose. Today he informed me
that he had finished his plan before he read Milton. He was enchanted
to see an author who before him had trod the same path. This is a
contradiction of what he said before. He did not wish to speak of his
poem to any one till it was finished: but some of his friends who had
seen what he had finished, tormented him till he had consented to
publish a few books in a journal. He was then, I believe, very young,
about twenty-five. The rest was printed at different periods, four
books at a time. The reception given to the first specimens was highly
flattering. He was nearly thirty years in finishing the whole poem,
but of these thirty years not more than two were employed in the
composition. He only composed in favourable moments; besides he had
other occupations. He values himself upon the plan of his odes, and
accuses the modern lyrical writers of gross deficiency in this
respect. I laid the same accusation against Horace: he would not hear
of it--but waived the discussion. He called Rousseau's ODE TO FORTUNE
a moral dissertation in stanzas. I spoke of Dryden's ST. CECILIA; but
he did not seem familiar with our writers. He wished to know the
distinctions between our dramatic and epic blank verse. He recommended
me to read his HERMANN before I read either THE MESSIAH or the odes.
He flattered himself that some time or other his dramatic poems would
be known in England. He had not heard of Cowper. He thought that Voss
in his translation of THE ILIAD had done violence to the idiom of the
Germans, and had sacrificed it to the Greeks, not remembering
sufficiently that each language has its particular spirit and genius.
He said Lessing was the first of their dramatic writers. I complained
of NATHAN as tedious. He said there was not enough of action in it;
but that Lessing was the most chaste of their writers. He spoke
favourably of Goethe; but said that his SORROWS OF WERTER was his best
work, better than any of his dramas: he preferred the first written to
the rest of Goethe's dramas. Schiller's ROBBERS he found so
extravagant, that he could not read it. I spoke of the scene of the
setting sun. He did not know it. He said Schiller could not live. He
thought DON CARLOS the best of his dramas; but said that the plot was
inextricable.--It was evident he knew little of Schiller's works:
indeed, he said, he could not read them. Buerger, he said, was a true
poet, and would live; that Schiller, on the contrary, must soon be
forgotten; that he gave himself up to the imitation of Shakespeare,
who often was extravagant, but that Schiller was ten thousand times
more so. He spoke very slightingly of Kotzebue, as an immoral author
in the first place, and next, as deficient in power. At Vienna, said
he, they are transported with him; but we do not reckon the people of
Vienna either the wisest or the wittiest people of Germany. He said
Wieland was a charming author, and a sovereign master of his own
language: that in this respect Goethe could not be compared to him,
nor indeed could any body else. He said that his fault was to be
fertile to exuberance. I told him the OBERON had just been translated
into English. He asked me if I was not delighted with the poem. I
answered, that I thought the story began to flag about the seventh or
eighth book; and observed, that it was unworthy of a man of genius to
make the interest of a long poem turn entirely upon animal
gratification. He seemed at first disposed to excuse this by saying,
that there are different subjects for poetry, and that poets are not
willing to be restricted in their choice. I answered, that I thought
the passion of love as well suited to the purposes of poetry as any
other passion; but that it was a cheap way of pleasing to fix the
attention of the reader through a long poem on the mere appetite.
Well! but, said he, you see, that such poems please every body. I
answered, that it was the province of a great poet to raise people up
to his own level, not to descend to theirs. He agreed, and confessed,
that on no account whatsoever would he have written a work like the
OBERON. He spoke in raptures of Wieland's style, and pointed out the
passage where Retzia is delivered of her child, as exquisitely
beautiful. I said that I did not perceive any very striking passages;
but that I made allowance for the imperfections of a translation. Of
the thefts of Wieland, he said, they were so exquisitely managed, that
the greatest writers might be proud to steal as he did. He considered
the books and fables of old romance writers in the light of the
ancient mythology, as a sort of common property, from which a man was
free to take whatever he could make a good use of. An Englishman had
presented him with the odes of Collins, which he had read with
pleasure. He knew little or nothing of Gray, except his ELEGY written
in a country CHURCH-YARD. He complained of the fool in LEAR. I
observed that he seemed to give a terrible wildness to the distress;
but still he complained. He asked whether it was not allowed, that
Pope had written rhymed poetry with more skill than any of our
writers--I said I preferred Dryden, because his couplets had greater
variety in their movement. He thought my reason a good one; but asked
whether the rhyme of Pope were not more exact. This question I
understood as applying to the final terminations, and observed to him
that I believed it was the case; but that I thought it was easy to
excuse some inaccuracy in the final sounds, if the general sweep of
the verse was superior. I told him that we were not so exact with
regard to the final endings of the lines as the French. He did not
seem to know that we made no distinction between masculine and
feminine (i.e. single or double,) rhymes: at least he put inquiries to
me on this subject. He seemed to think that no language could be so
far formed as that it might not be enriched by idioms borrowed from
another tongue. I said this was a very dangerous practice; and added,
that I thought Milton had often injured both his prose and verse by
taking this liberty too frequently. I recommended to him the prose
works of Dryden as models of pure and native English. I was treading
upon tender ground, as I have reason to suppose that he has himself
liberally indulged in the practice."
The same day I dined at Mr. Klopstock's, where I had the pleasure of a
third interview with the poet. We talked principally about indifferent
things. I asked him what he thought of Kant. He said that his
reputation was much on the decline in Germany. That for his own part
he was not surprised to find it so, as the works of Kant were to him
utterly incomprehensible--that he had often been pestered by the
Kanteans; but was rarely in the practice of arguing with them. His
custom was to produce the book, open it and point to a passage, and
beg they would explain it. This they ordinarily attempted to do by
substituting their own ideas. I do not want, I say, an explanation of
your own ideas, but of the passage which is before us. In this way I
generally bring the dispute to an immediate conclusion. He spoke of
Wolfe as the first Metaphysician they had in Germany. Wolfe had
followers; but they could hardly be called a sect, and luckily till
the appearance of Kant, about fifteen years ago, Germany had not been
pestered by any sect of philosophers whatsoever; but that each man had
separately pursued his inquiries uncontrolled by the dogmas of a
master. Kant had appeared ambitious to be the founder of a sect; that
he had succeeded: but that the Germans were now coming to their senses
again. That Nicolai and Engel had in different ways contributed to
disenchant the nation; but above all the incomprehensibility of the
philosopher and his philosophy. He seemed pleased to hear, that as yet
Kant's doctrines had not met with many admirers in England--did not
doubt but that we had too much wisdom to be duped by a writer who set
at defiance the common sense and common understandings of men. We
talked of tragedy. He seemed to rate highly the power of exciting
tears--I said that nothing was more easy than to deluge an audience,
that it was done every day by the meanest writers.
I must remind you, my friend, first, that these notes are not intended
as specimens of Klopstock's intellectual power, or even "colloquial
prowess," to judge of which by an accidental conversation, and this
with strangers, and those too foreigners, would be not only
unreasonable, but calumnious. Secondly, I attribute little other
interest to the remarks than what is derived from the celebrity of the
person who made them. Lastly, if you ask me, whether I have read THE
MESSIAH, and what I think of it? I answer--as yet the first four books
only: and as to my opinion--(the reasons of which hereafter)--you may
guess it from what I could not help muttering to myself, when the good
pastor this morning told me, that Klopstock was the German Milton--"a
very German Milton indeed!!!"
Heaven preserve you, and                         S. T. COLERIDGE.

[Here ends chapter 22.  To read other chapters of
Biographia Literaria, click here.]

Biographia Literaria – Chapter XXI (by Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

11 Friday Jun 2010

Posted by Crisis Chronicles Press in 1800s, Autobiography, British, Coleridge (Samuel T), Philosophy, Writing

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Samuel Taylor
Coleridge

Biographia
Literaria
by
Samuel
Taylor
Coleridge

Chapter XXI [of
XXIV]                                                     [To
read other chapters,
click here.]



Remarks on the present mode of conducting critical journals.

Long have I wished to see a fair and philosophical inquisition into
the character of Wordsworth, as a poet, on the evidence of his
published works; and a positive, not a comparative, appreciation of
their characteristic excellencies, deficiencies, and defects. I know
no claim that the mere opinion of any individual can have to weigh
down the opinion of the author himself; against the probability of
whose parental partiality we ought to set that of his having thought
longer and more deeply on the subject. But I should call that
investigation fair and philosophical in which the critic announces and
endeavours to establish the principles, which he holds for the
foundation of poetry in general, with the specification of these in
their application to the different classes of poetry. Having thus
prepared his canons of criticism for praise and condemnation, he would
proceed to particularize the most striking passages to which he deems
them applicable, faithfully noticing the frequent or infrequent
recurrence of similar merits or defects, and as faithfully
distinguishing what is characteristic from what is accidental, or a
mere flagging of the wing. Then if his premises be rational, his
deductions legitimate, and his conclusions justly applied, the reader,
and possibly the poet himself, may adopt his judgment in the light of
judgment and in the independence of free-agency. If he has erred, he
presents his errors in a definite place and tangible form, and holds
the torch and guides the way to their detection.
I most willingly admit, and estimate at a high value, the services
which the EDINBURGH REVIEW, and others formed afterwards on the same
plan, have rendered to society in the diffusion of knowledge. I think
the commencement of the EDINBURGH REVIEW an important epoch in
periodical criticism; and that it has a claim upon the gratitude of
the literary republic, and indeed of the reading public at large, for
having originated the scheme of reviewing those books only, which are
susceptible and deserving of argumentative criticism. Not less
meritorious, and far more faithfully and in general far more ably
executed, is their plan of supplying the vacant place of the trash or
mediocrity, wisely left to sink into oblivion by its own weight, with
original essays on the most interesting subjects of the time,
religious, or political; in which the titles of the books or pamphlets
prefixed furnish only the name and occasion of the disquisition. I do
not arraign the keenness, or asperity of its damnatory style, in and
for itself, as long as the author is addressed or treated as the mere
impersonation of the work then under trial. I have no quarrel with
them on this account, as long as no personal allusions are admitted,
and no re-commitment (for new trial) of juvenile performances, that
were published, perhaps forgotten, many years before the commencement
of the review: since for the forcing back of such works to public
notice no motives are easily assignable, but such as are furnished to
the critic by his own personal malignity; or what is still worse, by a
habit of malignity in the form of mere wantonness.
"No private grudge they need, no personal spite
The viva sectio is its own delight!
All enmity, all envy, they disclaim,
Disinterested thieves of our good name:
Cool, sober murderers of their neighbour's fame!"
S. T. C.
Every censure, every sarcasm respecting a publication which the
critic, with the criticised work before him, can make good, is the
critic's right. The writer is authorized to reply, but not to
complain. Neither can anyone prescribe to the critic, how soft or how
hard; how friendly, or how bitter, shall be the phrases which he is to
select for the expression of such reprehension or ridicule. The critic
must know, what effect it is his object to produce; and with a view to
this effect must he weigh his words. But as soon as the critic
betrays, that he knows more of his author, than the author's
publications could have told him; as soon as from this more intimate
knowledge, elsewhere obtained, he avails himself of the slightest
trait against the author; his censure instantly becomes personal
injury, his sarcasms personal insults. He ceases to be a critic, and
takes on him the most contemptible character to which a rational
creature can be degraded, that of a gossip, backbiter, and
pasquillant: but with this heavy aggravation, that he steals the
unquiet, the deforming passions of the world into the museum; into the
very place which, next to the chapel and oratory, should be our
sanctuary, and secure place of refuge; offers abominations on the
altar of the Muses; and makes its sacred paling the very circle in
which he conjures up the lying and profane spirit.
This determination of unlicensed personality, and of permitted and
legitimate censure, (which I owe in part to the illustrious Lessing,
himself a model of acute, spirited, sometimes stinging, but always
argumentative and honourable, criticism) is beyond controversy the
true one: and though I would not myself exercise all the rights of the
latter, yet, let but the former be excluded, I submit myself to its
exercise in the hands of others, without complaint and without
resentment.
Let a communication be formed between any number of learned men in the
various branches of science and literature; and whether the president
and central committee be in London, or Edinburgh, if only they
previously lay aside their individuality, and pledge themselves
inwardly, as well as ostensibly, to administer judgment according to a
constitution and code of laws; and if by grounding this code on the
two-fold basis of universal morals and philosophic reason, independent
of all foreseen application to particular works and authors, they
obtain the right to speak each as the representative of their body
corporate; they shall have honour and good wishes from me, and I shall
accord to them their fair dignities, though self-assumed, not less
cheerfully than if I could inquire concerning them in the herald's
office, or turn to them in the book of peerage. However loud may be
the outcries for prevented or subverted reputation, however numerous
and impatient the complaints of merciless severity and insupportable
despotism, I shall neither feel, nor utter aught but to the defence
and justification of the critical machine. Should any literary Quixote
find himself provoked by its sounds and regular movements, I should
admonish him with Sancho Panza, that it is no giant but a windmill;
there it stands on its own place, and its own hillock, never goes out
of its way to attack anyone, and to none and from none either gives or
asks assistance. When the public press has poured in any part of its
produce between its mill-stones, it grinds it off, one man's sack the
same as another, and with whatever wind may happen to be then blowing.
All the two-and-thirty winds are alike its friends. Of the whole wide
atmosphere it does not desire a single finger-breadth more than what
is necessary for its sails to turn round in. But this space must be
left free and unimpeded. Gnats, beetles, wasps, butterflies, and the
whole tribe of ephemerals and insignificants, may flit in and out and
between; may hum, and buzz, and jar; may shrill their tiny pipes, and
wind their puny horns, unchastised and unnoticed. But idlers and
bravadoes of larger size and prouder show must beware, how they place
themselves within its sweep. Much less may they presume to lay hands
on the sails, the strength of which is neither greater nor less than
as the wind is, which drives them round. Whomsoever the remorseless
arm slings aloft, or whirls along with it in the air, he has himself
alone to blame; though, when the same arm throws him from it, it will
more often double than break the force of his fall.
Putting aside the too manifest and too frequent interference of
national party, and even personal predilection or aversion; and
reserving for deeper feelings those worse and more criminal intrusions
into the sacredness of private life, which not seldom merit legal
rather than literary chastisement, the two principal objects and
occasions which I find for blame and regret in the conduct of the
review in question are first, its unfaithfulness to its own announced
and excellent plan, by subjecting to criticism works neither indecent
nor immoral, yet of such trifling importance even in point of size
and, according to the critic's own verdict, so devoid of all merit, as
must excite in the most candid mind the suspicion, either that dislike
or vindictive feelings were at work; or that there was a cold
prudential pre-determination to increase the sale of the review by
flattering the malignant passions of human nature. That I may not
myself become subject to the charge, which I am bringing against
others, by an accusation without proof, I refer to the article on Dr.
Rennell's sermon in the very first number of the EDINBURGH REVIEW as
an illustration of my meaning. If in looking through all the
succeeding volumes the reader should find this a solitary instance, I
must submit to that painful forfeiture of esteem, which awaits a
groundless or exaggerated charge.
The second point of objection belongs to this review only in common
with all other works of periodical criticism: at least, it applies in
common to the general system of all, whatever exception there may be
in favour of particular articles. Or if it attaches to THE EDINBURGH
REVIEW, and to its only corrival (THE QUARTERLY), with any peculiar
force, this results from the superiority of talent, acquirement, and
information which both have so undeniably displayed; and which
doubtless deepens the regret though not the blame. I am referring to
the substitution of assertion for argument; to the frequency of
arbitrary and sometimes petulant verdicts, not seldom unsupported even
by a single quotation from the work condemned, which might at least
have explained the critic's meaning, if it did not prove the justice
of his sentence. Even where this is not the case, the extracts are too
often made without reference to any general grounds or rules from
which the faultiness or inadmissibility of the qualities attributed
may be deduced; and without any attempt to show, that the qualities
are attributable to the passage extracted. I have met with such
extracts from Mr. Wordsworth's poems, annexed to such assertions, as
led me to imagine, that the reviewer, having written his critique
before he had read the work, had then pricked with a pin for passages,
wherewith to illustrate the various branches of his preconceived
opinions. By what principle of rational choice can we suppose a critic
to have been directed (at least in a Christian country, and himself,
we hope, a Christian) who gives the following lines, portraying the
fervour of solitary devotion excited by the magnificent display of the
Almighty's works, as a proof and example of an author's tendency to
downright ravings, and absolute unintelligibility?
"O then what soul was his, when on the tops
Of the high mountains he beheld the sun
Rise up, and bathe the world in light! He looked--
Ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth,
And ocean's liquid mass, beneath him lay
In gladness and deep joy. The clouds were touched,
And in their silent faces did he read
Unutterable love. Sound needed none,
Nor any voice of joy: his spirit drank
The spectacle! sensation, soul, and form,
All melted into him; they swallowed up
His animal being; in them did he live,
And by them did he live: they were his life."
Can it be expected, that either the author or his admirers, should be
induced to pay any serious attention to decisions which prove nothing
but the pitiable state of the critic's own taste and sensibility? On
opening the review they see a favourite passage, of the force and
truth of which they had an intuitive certainty in their own inward
experience confirmed, if confirmation it could receive, by the
sympathy of their most enlightened friends; some of whom perhaps, even
in the world's opinion, hold a higher intellectual rank than the
critic himself would presume to claim. And this very passage they find
selected, as the characteristic effusion of a mind deserted by
reason!--as furnishing evidence that the writer was raving, or he
could not have thus strung words together without sense or purpose! No
diversity of taste seems capable of explaining such a contrast in
judgment.
That I had over-rated the merit of a passage or poem, that I had erred
concerning the degree of its excellence, I might be easily induced to
believe or apprehend. But that lines, the sense of which I had
analysed and found consonant with all the best convictions of my
understanding; and the imagery and diction of which had collected
round those convictions my noblest as well as my most delightful
feelings; that I should admit such lines to be mere nonsense or
lunacy, is too much for the most ingenious arguments to effect. But
that such a revolution of taste should be brought about by a few broad
assertions, seems little less than impossible. On the contrary, it
would require an effort of charity not to dismiss the criticism with
the aphorism of the wise man, in animam malevolam sapientia haud
intrare potest.
What then if this very critic should have cited a large number of
single lines and even of long paragraphs, which he himself
acknowledges to possess eminent and original beauty? What if he
himself has owned, that beauties as great are scattered in abundance
throughout the whole book? And yet, though under this impression,
should have commenced his critique in vulgar exultation with a
prophecy meant to secure its own fulfilment? With a "This won't do!"
What? if after such acknowledgments extorted from his own judgment he
should proceed from charge to charge of tameness and raving; flights
and flatness; and at length, consigning the author to the house of
incurables, should conclude with a strain of rudest contempt evidently
grounded in the distempered state of his own moral associations?
Suppose too all this done without a single leading principle
established or even announced, and without any one attempt at
argumentative deduction, though the poet had presented a more than
usual opportunity for it, by having previously made public his own
principles of judgment in poetry, and supported them by a connected
train of reasoning!
The office and duty of the poet is to select the most dignified as
well as
"The gayest, happiest attitude of things."
The reverse, for in all cases a reverse is possible, is the
appropriate business of burlesque and travesty, a predominant taste
for which has been always deemed a mark of a low and degraded mind.
When I was at Rome, among many other visits to the tomb of Julius II.
I went thither once with a Prussian artist, a man of genius and great
vivacity of feeling. As we were gazing on Michael Angelo's MOSES, our
conversation turned on the horns and beard of that stupendous statue;
of the necessity of each to support the other; of the super-human
effect of the former, and the necessity of the existence of both to
give a harmony and integrity both to the image and the feeling excited
by it. Conceive them removed, and the statue would become un-natural,
without being super-natural. We called to mind the horns of the rising
sun, and I repeated the noble passage from Taylor's HOLY DYING. That
horns were the emblem of power and sovereignty among the Eastern
nations, and are still retained as such in Abyssinia; the Achelous of
the ancient Greeks; and the probable ideas and feelings, that
originally suggested the mixture of the human and the brute form in
the figure, by which they realized the idea of their mysterious Pan,
as representing intelligence blended with a darker power, deeper,
mightier, and more universal than the conscious intellect of man; than
intelligence;--all these thoughts and recollections passed in
procession before our minds. My companion who possessed more than his
share of the hatred, which his countrymen bore to the French, had just
observed to me, "a Frenchman, Sir! is the only animal in the human
shape, that by no possibility can lift itself up to religion or
poetry:" when, lo! two French officers of distinction and rank entered
the church! "Mark you," whispered the Prussian, "the first thing which
those scoundrels will notice--(for they will begin by instantly
noticing the statue in parts, without one moment's pause of admiration
impressed by the whole)--will be the horns and the beard. And the
associations, which they will immediately connect with them will be
those of a he-goat and a cuckold." Never did man guess more luckily.
Had he inherited a portion of the great legislator's prophetic powers,
whose statue we had been contemplating, he could scarcely have uttered
words more coincident with the result: for even as he had said, so it
came to pass.
In THE EXCURSION the poet has introduced an old man, born in humble
but not abject circumstances, who had enjoyed more than usual
advantages of education, both from books and from the more awful
discipline of nature. This person he represents, as having been driven
by the restlessness of fervid feelings, and from a craving intellect
to an itinerant life; and as having in consequence passed the larger
portion of his time, from earliest manhood, in villages and hamlets
from door to door,
"A vagrant Merchant bent beneath his load."
Now whether this be a character appropriate to a lofty didactick poem,
is perhaps questionable. It presents a fair subject for controversy;
and the question is to be determined by the congruity or incongruity
of such a character with what shall be proved to be the essential
constituents of poetry. But surely the critic who, passing by all the
opportunities which such a mode of life would present to such a man;
all the advantages of the liberty of nature, of solitude, and of
solitary thought; all the varieties of places and seasons, through
which his track had lain, with all the varying imagery they bring with
them; and lastly, all the observations of men,
"Their manners, their enjoyments, and pursuits,
Their passions and their feelings="
which the memory of these yearly journeys must have given and recalled
to such a mind--the critic, I say, who from the multitude of possible
associations should pass by all these in order to fix his attention
exclusively on the pin-papers, and stay-tapes, which might have been
among the wares of his pack; this critic, in my opinion, cannot be
thought to possess a much higher or much healthier state of moral
feeling, than the Frenchmen above recorded.

[Here ends chapter 21.  To read other chapters of
Biographia Literaria, click here.]



  

Biographia Literaria – Chapter XX (by Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

11 Friday Jun 2010

Posted by Crisis Chronicles Press in 1800s, Autobiography, British, Coleridge (Samuel T), Philosophy, Writing

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Samuel Taylor
Coleridge

Biographia
Literaria
by
Samuel
Taylor
Coleridge

Chapter XX [of
XXII]                                                     [To
read other chapters,
click here.]



The former subject continued–The neutral style, or that common to
Prose and Poetry, exemplified by specimens from Chaucer, Herbert, and
others.

I have no fear in declaring my conviction, that the excellence defined
and exemplified in the preceding chapter is not the characteristic
excellence of Mr. Wordsworth's style; because I can add with equal
sincerity, that it is precluded by higher powers. The praise of
uniform adherence to genuine, logical English is undoubtedly his; nay,
laying the main emphasis on the word uniform, I will dare add that, of
all contemporary poets, it is his alone. For, in a less absolute sense
of the word, I should certainly include Mr. Bowies, Lord Byron, and,
as to all his later writings, Mr. Southey, the exceptions in their
works being so few and unimportant. But of the specific excellence
described in the quotation from Garve, I appear to find more, and more
undoubted specimens in the works of others; for instance, among the
minor poems of Mr. Thomas Moore, and of our illustrious Laureate. To
me it will always remain a singular and noticeable fact; that a
theory, which would establish this lingua communis, not only as the
best, but as the only commendable style, should have proceeded from a
poet, whose diction, next to that of Shakespeare and Milton, appears
to me of all others the most individualized and characteristic. And
let it be remembered too, that I am now interpreting the controverted
passages of Mr. Wordsworth's critical preface by the purpose and
object, which he may be supposed to have intended, rather than by the
sense which the words themselves must convey, if they are taken
without this allowance.

A person of any taste, who had but studied three or four of
Shakespeare's principal plays, would without the name affixed scarcely
fail to recognise as Shakespeare's a quotation from any other play,
though but of a few lines. A similar peculiarity, though in a less
degree, attends Mr. Wordsworth's style, whenever he speaks in his own
person; or whenever, though under a feigned name, it is clear that he
himself is still speaking, as in the different dramatis personae of
THE RECLUSE. Even in the other poems, in which he purposes to be most
dramatic, there are few in which it does not occasionally burst forth.
The reader might often address the poet in his own words with
reference to the persons introduced:

"It seems, as I retrace the ballad line by line
That but half of it is theirs, and the better half is thine."

Who, having been previously acquainted with any considerable portion
of Mr. Wordsworth's publications, and having studied them with a full
feeling of the author's genius, would not at once claim as
Wordsworthian the little poem on the rainbow?

"The Child is father of the Man, etc."

Or in the LUCY GRAY?

"No mate, no comrade Lucy knew;
She dwelt on a wide moor;
The sweetest thing that ever grew
Beside a human door."

Or in the IDLE SHEPHERD-BOYS?

"Along the river's stony marge
The sand-lark chants a joyous song;
The thrush is busy in the wood,
And carols loud and strong.
A thousand lambs are on the rocks,
All newly born! both earth and sky
Keep jubilee, and more than all,
Those boys with their green coronal;
They never hear the cry,
That plaintive cry! which up the hill
Comes from the depth of Dungeon-Ghyll."

Need I mention the exquisite description of the Sea-Loch in THE BLIND
HIGHLAND BOY. Who but a poet tells a tale in such language to the
little ones by the fire-side as--

"Yet had he many a restless dream;
Both when he heard the eagle's scream,
And when he heard the torrents roar,
And heard the water beat the shore
Near where their cottage stood.

Beside a lake their cottage stood,
Not small like our's, a peaceful flood;
But one of mighty size, and strange;
That, rough or smooth, is full of change,
And stirring in its bed.

For to this lake, by night and day,
The great Sea-water finds its way
Through long, long windings of the hills,
And drinks up all the pretty rills
And rivers large and strong:

Then hurries back the road it came
Returns on errand still the same;
This did it when the earth was new;
And this for evermore will do,
As long as earth shall last.

And, with the coming of the tide,
Come boats and ships that sweetly ride,
Between the woods and lofty rocks;
And to the shepherds with their flocks
Bring tales of distant lands."

I might quote almost the whole of his RUTH, but take the following
stanzas:

But, as you have before been told,
This Stripling, sportive, gay, and bold,
And, with his dancing crest,
So beautiful, through savage lands
Had roamed about with vagrant bands
Of Indians in the West.

The wind, the tempest roaring high,
The tumult of a tropic sky,
Might well be dangerous food
For him, a Youth to whom was given
So much of earth--so much of heaven,
And such impetuous blood.

Whatever in those climes he found
Irregular in sight or sound
Did to his mind impart
A kindred impulse, seemed allied
To his own powers, and justified
The workings of his heart.

Nor less, to feed voluptuous thought,
The beauteous forms of nature wrought,
Fair trees and lovely flowers;
The breezes their own languor lent;
The stars had feelings, which they sent
Into those magic bowers.

Yet in his worst pursuits, I ween,
That sometimes there did intervene
Pure hopes of high intent
For passions linked to forms so fair
And stately, needs must have their share
Of noble sentiment."

But from Mr. Wordsworth's more elevated compositions, which already
form three-fourths of his works; and will, I trust, constitute
hereafter a still larger proportion;--from these, whether in rhyme or
blank verse, it would be difficult and almost superfluous to select
instances of a diction peculiarly his own, of a style which cannot be
imitated without its being at once recognised, as originating in Mr.
Wordsworth. It would not be easy to open on any one of his loftier
strains, that does not contain examples of this; and more in
proportion as the lines are more excellent, and most like the author.
For those, who may happen to have been less familiar with his
writings, I will give three specimens taken with little choice. The
first from the lines on the BOY OF WINANDER-MERE,--who

"Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls,
That they might answer him.--And they would shout
Across the watery vale, and shout again,
With long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud
Redoubled and redoubled; concourse wild
Of mirth and jocund din! And when it chanced,
That pauses of deep silence mocked his skill,
Then sometimes in that silence, while he hung
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise
Has carried far into his heart the voice
Of mountain-torrents; or the visible scene [73]
Would enter unawares into his mind
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,
Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received
Into the bosom of the steady lake."

The second shall be that noble imitation of Drayton [74] (if it was
not rather a coincidence) in the lines TO JOANNA.

--"When I had gazed perhaps two minutes' space,
Joanna, looking in my eyes, beheld
That ravishment of mine, and laughed aloud.
The Rock, like something starting from a sleep,
Took up the Lady's voice, and laughed again!
That ancient woman seated on Helm-crag
Was ready with her cavern; Hammar-scar
And the tall Steep of Silver-How sent forth
A noise of laughter; southern Lougbrigg heard,
And Fairfield answered with a mountain tone.
Helvellyn far into the clear blue sky
Carried the lady's voice!--old Skiddaw blew
His speaking trumpet!--back out of the clouds
From Glaramara southward came the voice:
And Kirkstone tossed it from its misty head!"

The third, which is in rhyme, I take from the SONG AT THE FEAST OF
BROUGHAM CASTLE, upon the restoration of Lord Clifford, the Shepherd,
to the Estates and Honours of his Ancestors.

------"Now another day is come,
Fitter hope, and nobler doom;
He hath thrown aside his crook,
And hath buried deep his book;
Armour rusting in his halls
On the blood of Clifford calls,--
'Quell the Scot,' exclaims the Lance!
Bear me to the heart of France,
Is the longing of the Shield--
Tell thy name, thou trembling Field!--
Field of death, where'er thou be,
Groan thou with our victory!
Happy day, and mighty hour,
When our Shepherd, in his power,
Mailed and horsed, with lance and sword,
To his ancestors restored,
Like a re-appearing Star,
Like a glory from afar,
First shall head the flock of war!"

"Alas! the fervent harper did not know,
That for a tranquil Soul the Lay was framed,
Who, long compelled in humble walks to go,
Was softened into feeling, soothed, and tamed.

Love had he found in huts where poor men lie;
His daily teachers had been woods and rills,
The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills."

The words themselves in the foregoing extracts, are, no doubt,
sufficiently common for the greater part.--But in what poem are they
not so, if we except a few misadventurous attempts to translate the
arts and sciences into verse? In THE EXCURSION the number of
polysyllabic (or what the common people call, dictionary) words is
more than usually great. And so must it needs be, in proportion to the
number and variety of an author's conceptions, and his solicitude to
express them with precision.--But are those words in those places
commonly employed in real life to express the same thought or outward
thing? Are they the style used in the ordinary intercourse of spoken
words? No! nor are the modes of connections; and still less the breaks
and transitions. Would any but a poet--at least could any one without
being conscious that he had expressed himself with noticeable
vivacity--have described a bird singing loud by, "The thrush is busy
in the wood?"--or have spoken of boys with a string of club-moss round
their rusty hats, as the boys "with their green coronal?"--or have
translated a beautiful May-day into "Both earth and sky keep jubilee!"
--or have brought all the different marks and circumstances of a
sealoch before the mind, as the actions of a living and acting power?
Or have represented the reflection of the sky in the water, as "That
uncertain heaven received into the bosom of the steady lake?" Even the
grammatical construction is not unfrequently peculiar; as "The wind,
the tempest roaring high, the tumult of a tropic sky, might well be
dangerous food to him, a youth to whom was given, etc." There is a
peculiarity in the frequent use of the asymartaeton (that is, the
omission of the connective particle before the last of several words,
or several sentences used grammatically as single words, all being in
the same case and governing or governed by the same verb) and not less
in the construction of words by apposition ("to him, a youth"). In
short, were there excluded from Mr. Wordsworth's poetic compositions
all, that a literal adherence to the theory of his preface would
exclude, two thirds at least of the marked beauties of his poetry must
be erased. For a far greater number of lines would be sacrificed than
in any other recent poet; because the pleasure received from
Wordsworth's poems being less derived either from excitement of
curiosity or the rapid flow of narration, the striking passages form a
larger proportion of their value. I do not adduce it as a fair
criterion of comparative excellence, nor do I even think it such; but
merely as matter of fact. I affirm, that from no contemporary writer
could so many lines be quoted, without reference to the poem in which
they are found, for their own independent weight or beauty. From the
sphere of my own experience I can bring to my recollection three
persons of no every-day powers and acquirements, who had read the
poems of others with more and more unallayed pleasure, and had thought
more highly of their authors, as poets; who yet have confessed to me,
that from no modern work had so many passages started up anew in their
minds at different times, and as different occasions had awakened a
meditative mood.


[Here ends chapter 20.  To read other chapters of
Biographia Literaria, click here.]

* * *


FOOTNOTES 
[by Samuel Taylor Coleridge]

[73] Mr. Wordsworth's having judiciously adopted "concourse wild" in
this passage for "a wild scene" as it stood to the former edition,
encourages me to hazard a remark, which I certainly should not have
made in the works of a poet less austerely accurate in the use of
words, than he is, to his own great honour. It respects the propriety
of the word, "scene," even in the sentence in which it is retained.
Dryden, and he only in his more careless verses, was the first, as far
as my researches have discovered, who for the convenience of rhyme
used this word in the vague sense, which has been since too current
even in our best writers, and which (unfortunately, I think) is given
as its first explanation in Dr. Johnson's Dictionary and therefore
would be taken by an incautious reader as its proper sense. In
Shakespeare and Milton the word is never used without some clear
reference, proper or metaphorical, to the theatre. Thus Milton:
"Cedar, and pine, and fir, and branching palm
A sylvan scene; and, as the ranks ascend
Shade above shade, a woody theatre
Of stateliest view."
I object to any extension of its meaning, because the word is already
more equivocal than might be wished; inasmuch as to the limited use,
which I recommend, it may still signify two different things; namely,
the scenery, and the characters and actions presented on the stage
during the presence of particular scenes. It can therefore be
preserved from obscurity only by keeping the original signification
full in the mind. Thus Milton again,
------"Prepare thee for another scene."
[74] Which Copland scarce had spoke, but quickly every hill,
Upon her verge that stands, the neighbouring vallies fill;
Helvillon from his height, it through the mountains threw,
From whom as soon again, the sound Dunbalrase drew,
From whose stone-trophied head, it on the Windross went,
Which tow'rds the sea again, resounded it to Dent.
That Brodwater, therewith within her banks astound,
In sailing to the sea, told it to Egremound,
Whose buildings, walks, and streets, with echoes loud and long,
Did mightily commend old Copland for her song.
Drayton's POLYOLBION: Song XXX.

  

Biographia Literaria – Chapter XIX (by Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

10 Thursday Jun 2010

Posted by Crisis Chronicles Press in 1800s, Autobiography, British, Coleridge (Samuel T), Philosophy, Writing

≈ Leave a comment

Samuel Taylor
Coleridge

Biographia
Literaria
by
Samuel
Taylor
Coleridge

Chapter XIX [of
XXII]                                                     [To
read other chapters,
click here.]



Continuation–Concerning the real object which, it is probable, Mr.
Wordsworth
had before him in his critical preface–Elucidation and
application of this.

It might appear from some passages in the former part of Mr.
Wordsworth's preface, that he meant to confine his theory of style,
and the necessity of a close accordance with the actual language of
men, to those particular subjects from low and rustic life, which by
way of experiment he had purposed to naturalize as a new species in
our English poetry. But from the train of argument that follows; from
the reference to Milton; and from the spirit of his critique on Gray's
sonnet; those sentences appear to have been rather courtesies of
modesty, than actual limitations of his system. Yet so groundless does
this system appear on a close examination; and so strange and
overwhelming [70] in its consequences, that I cannot, and I do not,
believe that the poet did ever himself adopt it in the unqualified
sense, in which his expressions have been understood by others, and
which, indeed, according to all the common laws of interpretation they
seem to bear. What then did he mean? I apprehend, that in the clear
perception, not unaccompanied with disgust or contempt, of the gaudy
affectations of a style which passed current with too many for poetic
diction, (though in truth it had as little pretensions to poetry, as
to logic or common sense,) he narrowed his view for the time; and
feeling a justifiable preference for the language of nature and of
good sense, even in its humblest and least ornamented forms, he
suffered himself to express, in terms at once too large and too
exclusive, his predilection for a style the most remote possible from
the false and showy splendour which he wished to explode. It is
possible, that this predilection, at first merely comparative,
deviated for a time into direct partiality. But the real object which
he had in view, was, I doubt not, a species of excellence which had
been long before most happily characterized by the judicious and
amiable Garve, whose works are so justly beloved and esteemed by the
Germans, in his remarks on Gellert, from which the following is
literally translated. "The talent, that is required in order to make,
excellent verses, is perhaps greater than the philosopher is ready to
admit, or would find it in his power to acquire: the talent to seek
only the apt expression of the thought, and yet to find at the same
time with it the rhyme and the metre. Gellert possessed this happy
gift, if ever any one of our poets possessed it; and nothing perhaps
contributed more to the great and universal impression which his
fables made on their first publication, or conduces more to their
continued popularity. It was a strange and curious phaenomenon, and
such as in Germany had been previously unheard of, to read verses in
which everything was expressed just as one would wish to talk, and yet
all dignified, attractive, and interesting; and all at the same time
perfectly correct as to the measure of the syllables and the rhyme. It
is certain, that poetry when it has attained this excellence makes a
far greater impression than prose. So much so indeed, that even the
gratification which the very rhymes afford, becomes then no longer a
contemptible or trifling gratification." [71]

However novel this phaenomenon may have been in Germany at the time of
Gellert, it is by no means new, nor yet of recent existence in our
language. Spite of the licentiousness with which Spenser occasionally
compels the orthography of his words into a subservience to his
rhymes, the whole FAIRY QUEEN is an almost continued instance of this
beauty. Waller's song GO, LOVELY ROSE, is doubtless familiar to most
of my readers; but if I had happened to have had by me the Poems of
Cotton, more but far less deservedly celebrated as the author of the
VIRGIL TRAVESTIED, I should have indulged myself, and I think have
gratified many, who are not acquainted with his serious works, by
selecting some admirable specimens of this style. There are not a few
poems in that volume, replete with every excellence of thought, image,
and passion, which we expect or desire in the poetry of the milder
muse; and yet so worded, that the reader sees no one reason either in
the selection or the order of the words, why he might not have said
the very same in an appropriate conversation, and cannot conceive how
indeed he could have expressed such thoughts otherwise without loss or
injury to his meaning.

But in truth our language is, and from the first dawn of poetry ever
has been, particularly rich in compositions distinguished by this
excellence. The final e, which is now mute, in Chaucer's age was
either sounded or dropt indifferently. We ourselves still use either
"beloved" or "belov'd" according as the rhyme, or measure, or the
purpose of more or less solemnity may require. Let the reader then
only adopt the pronunciation of the poet and of the court, at which he
lived, both with respect to the final e and to the accentuation of the
last syllable; I would then venture to ask, what even in the
colloquial language of elegant and unaffected women, (who are the
peculiar mistresses of "pure English and undefiled,") what could we
hear more natural, or seemingly more unstudied, than the following
stanzas from Chaucer's TROILUS AND CRESEIDE.

"And after this forth to the gate he wente,
Ther as Creseide out rode a ful gode pass,
And up and doun there made he many' a wente,
And to himselfe ful oft he said, Alas!
Fro hennis rode my blisse and my solas
As woulde blisful God now for his joie,
I might her sene agen come in to Troie!
And to the yondir hil I gan her Bide,
Alas! and there I toke of her my leve
And yond I saw her to her fathir ride;
For sorow of whiche mine hert shall to-cleve;
And hithir home I came whan it was eve,
And here I dwel, out-cast from ally joie,
And steal, til I maie sene her efte in Troie.
"And of himselfe imaginid he ofte
To ben defaitid, pale and woxin lesse
Than he was wonte, and that men saidin softe,
What may it be? who can the sothe gesse,
Why Troilus hath al this hevinesse?
And al this n' as but his melancolie,
That he had of himselfe suche fantasie.
Anothir time imaginin he would
That every wight, that past him by the wey,
Had of him routhe, and that thei saien should,
I am right sory, Troilus wol dey!
And thus he drove a daie yet forth or twey,
As ye have herde: suche life gan he to lede
As he that stode betwixin hope and drede:
For which him likid in his songis shewe
Th' encheson of his wo as he best might,
And made a songe of words but a fewe,
Somwhat his woful herte for to light,
And whan he was from every mann'is sight
With softe voice he of his lady dere,
That absent was, gan sing as ye may here:

* * * * * *

This song, when he thus songin had, ful Bone
He fil agen into his sighis olde
And every night, as was his wonte to done;
He stode the bright moone to beholde
And all his sorowe to the moone he tolde,
And said: I wis, whan thou art hornid newe,
I shall be glad, if al the world be trewe!"

Another exquisite master of this species of style, where the scholar
and the poet supplies the material, but the perfect well-bred
gentleman the expressions and the arrangement, is George Herbert. As
from the nature of the subject, and the too frequent quaintness of the
thoughts, his TEMPLE; or SACRED POEMS AND PRIVAT E EJACULATIONS are
Comparatively but little known, I shall extract two poems. The first
is a sonnet, equally admirable for the weight, number, and expression
of the thoughts, and for the simple dignity of the language. Unless,
indeed, a fastidious taste should object to the latter half of the
sixth line. The second is a poem of greater length, which I have
chosen not only for the present purpose, but likewise as a striking
example and illustration of an assertion hazarded in a former page of
these sketches namely, that the characteristic fault of our elder
poets is the reverse of that, which distinguishes too many of our more
recent versifiers; the one conveying the most fantastic thoughts in
the most correct and natural language; the other in the most fantastic
language conveying the most trivial thoughts. The latter is a riddle
of words; the former an enigma of thoughts. The one reminds me of an
odd passage in Drayton's IDEAS

As other men, so I myself do muse,
Why in this sort I wrest invention so;
And why these giddy metaphors I use,
Leaving the path the greater part do go;
I will resolve you: I am lunatic! [72]

The other recalls a still odder passage in THE SYNAGOGUE: or THE
SHADOW OF THE TEMPLE, a connected series of poems in imitation of
Herbert's TEMPLE, and, in some editions, annexed to it.

O how my mind
Is gravell'd!
Not a thought,
That I can find,
But's ravell'd
All to nought!
Short ends of threds,
And narrow shreds
Of lists,
Knots, snarled ruffs,
Loose broken tufts
Of twists,
Are my torn meditations ragged clothing,
Which, wound and woven, shape a suit for nothing:
One while I think, and then I am in pain
To think how to unthink that thought again.

Immediately after these burlesque passages I cannot proceed to the
extracts promised, without changing the ludicrous tone of feeling by
the interposition of the three following stanzas of Herbert's.


VIRTUE.

Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
The bridal of the earth and sky,
The dew shall weep thy fall to-night;
For thou must die.

Sweet rose, whose hue angry and brave
Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye
Thy root is ever in its grave,
And thou must die.

Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses,
A box, where sweets compacted lie
My music shews, ye have your closes,
And all must die.


THE BOSOM SIN:
A SONNET BY GEORGE HERBERT.

Lord, with what care hast thou begirt us round,
Parents first season us; then schoolmasters
Deliver us to laws; they send us bound
To rules of reason, holy messengers,
Pulpits and Sundays, sorrow dogging sin,
Afflictions sorted, anguish of all sizes,
Fine nets and stratagems to catch us in,
Bibles laid open, millions of surprises;
Blessings beforehand, ties of gratefulness,
The sound of Glory ringing in our ears
Without, our shame; within, our consciences;
Angels and grace, eternal hopes and fears.
Yet all these fences and their whole array
One cunning bosom-sin blows quite away.


LOVE UNKNOWN.

Dear friend, sit down, the tale is long and sad
And in my faintings, I presume, your love
Will more comply than help. A Lord I had,
And have, of whom some grounds, which may improve,
I hold for two lives, and both lives in me.
To him I brought a dish of fruit one day,
And in the middle placed my heart. But he
(I sigh to say)
Look'd on a servant, who did know his eye,
Better than you know me, or (which is one)
Than I myself. The servant instantly,
Quitting the fruit, seiz'd on my heart alone,
And threw it in a font, wherein did fall
A stream of blood, which issued from the side
Of a great rock: I well remember all,
And have good cause: there it was dipt and dyed,
And wash'd, and wrung: the very wringing yet
Enforceth tears. "Your heart was foul, I fear."
Indeed 'tis true. I did and do commit
Many a fault, more than my lease will bear;
Yet still ask'd pardon, and was not denied.
But you shall hear. After my heart was well,
And clean and fair, as I one eventide
(I sigh to tell)
Walk'd by myself abroad, I saw a large
And spacious furnace flaming, and thereon
A boiling caldron, round about whose verge
Was in great letters set AFFLICTION.
The greatness shew'd the owner. So I went
To fetch a sacrifice out of my fold,
Thinking with that, which I did thus present,
To warm his love, which, I did fear, grew cold.
But as my heart did tender it, the man
Who was to take it from me, slipt his hand,
And threw my heart into the scalding pan;
My heart that brought it (do you understand?)
The offerer's heart. "Your heart was hard, I fear."
Indeed 'tis true. I found a callous matter
Began to spread and to expatiate there:
But with a richer drug than scalding water
I bath'd it often, ev'n with holy blood,
Which at a board, while many drank bare wine,
A friend did steal into my cup for good,
Ev'n taken inwardly, and most divine
To supple hardnesses. But at the length
Out of the caldron getting, soon I fled
Unto my house, where to repair the strength
Which I had lost, I hasted to my bed:
But when I thought to sleep out all these faults,
(I sigh to speak)
I found that some had stuff'd the bed with thoughts,
I would say thorns. Dear, could my heart not break,
When with my pleasures ev'n my rest was gone?
Full well I understood who had been there:
For I had given the key to none but one:
It must be he. "Your heart was dull, I fear."
Indeed a slack and sleepy state of mind
Did oft possess me; so that when I pray'd,
Though my lips went, my heart did stay behind.
But all my scores were by another paid,
Who took my guilt upon him. "Truly, Friend,
"For aught I hear, your Master shews to you
"More favour than you wot of. Mark the end.
"The font did only what was old renew
"The caldron suppled what was grown too hard:
"The thorns did quicken what was grown too dull:
"All did but strive to mend what you had marr'd.
"Wherefore be cheer'd, and praise him to the full
"Each day, each hour, each moment of the week
"Who fain would have you be new, tender quick."

[Here ends chapter 19.  To read other chapters of
Biographia Literaria, click here.]

* * *


FOOTNOTES 
[by Samuel Taylor Coleridge]

[70] 
I had in my mind the striking but untranslatable epithet, which
the celebrated Mendelssohn applied to the great founder of the
Critical Philosophy “Der alleszermalmende KANT,” that is, the all-
becrushing, or rather the all-to-nothing-crushing Kant. In the
facility and force of compound epithets, the German from the number of
its cases and inflections approaches to the Greek, that language so
“Bless’d in the happy marriage of sweet words.”
It is in the woful harshness of its sounds alone that the German need
shrink from the comparison.

[71] Sammlung einiger Abhandlungen von Christian Garve.

[72] Sonnet IX.

  

Biographia Literaria – Chapter XVIII (by Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

09 Wednesday Jun 2010

Posted by Crisis Chronicles Press in 1800s, Autobiography, British, Coleridge (Samuel T), Philosophy, Writing

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Biographia
Literaria
by
Samuel
Taylor
Coleridge

Chapter XVIII [of
XXII]                                                     [To
read other chapters,
click here.]



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.

I conclude, therefore, that the attempt is impracticable; and that,
were it not impracticable, it would still be useless. For the very
power of making the selection implies the previous possession of the
language selected. Or where can the poet have lived? And by what rules
could he direct his choice, which would not have enabled him to select
and arrange his words by the light of his own judgment? We do not
adopt the language of a class by the mere adoption of such words
exclusively, as that class would use, or at least understand; but
likewise by following the order, in which the words of such men are
wont to succeed each other. Now this order, in the intercourse of
uneducated men, is distinguished from the diction of their superiors
in knowledge and power, by the greater disjunction and separation in
the component parts of that, whatever it be, which they wish to
communicate. There is a want of that prospectiveness of mind, that
surview, which enables a man to foresee the whole of what he is to
convey, appertaining to any one point; and by this means so to
subordinate and arrange the different parts according to their
relative importance, as to convey it at once, and as an organized
whole.

Now I will take the first stanza, on which I have chanced to open, in
the Lyrical Ballads. It is one the most simple and the least peculiar
in its language.

"In distant countries have I been,
And yet I have not often seen
A healthy man, a man full grown,
Weep in the public roads, alone.
But such a one, on English ground,
And in the broad highway, I met;
Along the broad highway he came,
His cheeks with tears were wet
Sturdy he seemed, though he was sad;
And in his arms a lamb he had."

The words here are doubtless such as are current in all ranks of life;
and of course not less so in the hamlet and cottage than in the shop,
manufactory, college, or palace. But is this the order, in which the
rustic would have placed the words? I am grievously deceived, if the
following less compact mode of commencing the same tale be not a far
more faithful copy. "I have been in a many parts, far and near, and I
don't know that I ever saw before a man crying by himself in the
public road; a grown man I mean, that was neither sick nor hurt,"
etc., etc. But when I turn to the following stanza in The Thorn:

"At all times of the day and night
This wretched woman thither goes;
And she is known to every star,
And every wind that blows
And there, beside the Thorn, she sits,
When the blue day-light's in the skies,
And when the whirlwind's on the hill,
Or frosty air is keen and still,
And to herself she cries,
Oh misery! Oh misery!
Oh woe is me! Oh misery!"

and compare this with the language of ordinary men; or with that which
I can conceive at all likely to proceed, in real life, from such a
narrator, as is supposed in the note to the poem; compare it either in
the succession of the images or of the sentences; I am reminded of the
sublime prayer and hymn of praise, which Milton, in opposition to an
established liturgy, presents as a fair specimen of common extemporary
devotion, and such as we might expect to hear from every self-inspired
minister of a conventicle! And I reflect with delight, how little a
mere theory, though of his own workmanship, interferes with the
processes of genuine imagination in a man of true poetic genius, who
possesses, as Mr. Wordsworth, if ever man did, most assuredly does
possess,

"The Vision and the Faculty divine."

One point then alone remains, but that the most important; its
examination having been, indeed, my chief inducement for the preceding
inquisition. "There neither is nor can be any essential difference
between the language of prose and metrical composition." Such is Mr.
Wordsworth's assertion. Now prose itself, at least in all
argumentative and consecutive works, differs, and ought to differ,
from the language of conversation; even as [66] reading ought to
differ from talking. Unless therefore the difference denied be that of
the mere words, as materials common to all styles of writing, and not
of the style itself in the universally admitted sense of the term, it
might be naturally presumed that there must exist a still greater
between the ordonnance of poetic composition and that of prose, than
is expected to distinguish prose from ordinary conversation.

There are not, indeed, examples wanting in the history of literature,
of apparent paradoxes that have summoned the public wonder as new and
startling truths, but which, on examination, have shrunk into tame and
harmless truisms; as the eyes of a cat, seen in the dark, have been
mistaken for flames of fire. But Mr. Wordsworth is among the last men,
to whom a delusion of this kind would be attributed by anyone, who had
enjoyed the slightest opportunity of understanding his mind and
character. Where an objection has been anticipated by such an author
as natural, his answer to it must needs be interpreted in some sense
which either is, or has been, or is capable of being controverted. My
object then must be to discover some other meaning for the term
"essential difference" in this place, exclusive of the indistinction
and community of the words themselves. For whether there ought to
exist a class of words in the English, in any degree resembling the
poetic dialect of the Greek and Italian, is a question of very
subordinate importance. The number of such words would be small
indeed, in our language; and even in the Italian and Greek, they
consist not so much of different words, as of slight differences in
the forms of declining and conjugating the same words; forms,
doubtless, which having been, at some period more or less remote, the
common grammatic flexions of some tribe or province, had been
accidentally appropriated to poetry by the general admiration of
certain master intellects, the first established lights of
inspiration, to whom that dialect happened to be native.

Essence, in its primary signification, means the principle of
individuation, the inmost principle of the possibility of any thing,
as that particular thing. It is equivalent to the idea of a thing,
whenever we use the word, idea, with philosophic precision. Existence,
on the other hand, is distinguished from essence, by the
superinduction of reality. Thus we speak of the essence, and essential
properties of a circle; but we do not therefore assert, that any
thing, which really exists, is mathematically circular. Thus too,
without any tautology we contend for the existence of the Supreme
Being; that is, for a reality correspondent to the idea. There is,
next, a secondary use of the word essence, in which it signifies the
point or ground of contra-distinction between two modifications of the
same substance or subject. Thus we should be allowed to say, that the
style of architecture of Westminster Abbey is essentially different
from that of St. Paul, even though both had been built with blocks cut
into the same form, and from the same quarry. Only in this latter
sense of the term must it have been denied by Mr. Wordsworth (for in
this sense alone is it affirmed by the general opinion) that the
language of poetry (that is the formal construction, or architecture,
of the words and phrases) is essentially different from that of prose.
Now the burden of the proof lies with the oppugner, not with the
supporters of the common belief. Mr. Wordswo rth, in consequence,
assigns as the proof of his position, "that not only the language of a
large portion of every good poem, even of the most elevated character,
must necessarily, except with reference to the metre, in no respect
differ from that of good prose, but likewise that some of the most
interesting parts of the best poems will be found to be strictly the
language of prose, when prose is well written. The truth of this
assertion might be demonstrated by innumerable passages from almost
all the poetical writings, even of Milton himself." He then quotes
Gray's sonnet--

"In vain to me the smiling mornings shine,
And reddening Phoebus lifts his golden fire;
The birds in vain their amorous descant join,
Or cheerful fields resume their green attire.
These ears, alas! for other notes repine;
_A different object do these eyes require;
My lonely anguish melts no heart but mine;
And in my breast the imperfect joys expire._
Yet morning smiles the busy race to cheer,
And new-born pleasure brings to happier men;
The fields to all their wonted tribute bear;
To warm their little loves the birds complain:
_I fruitless mourn to him that cannot hear,
And weep the more, because I weep in vain."_

and adds the following remark:--"It will easily be perceived, that the
only part of this Sonnet which is of any value, is the lines printed
in italics; it is equally obvious, that, except in the rhyme, and in
the use of the single word `fruitless' for fruitlessly, which is so
far a defect, the language of these lines does in no respect differ
from that of prose."

An idealist defending his system by the fact, that when asleep we
often believe ourselves awake, was well answered by his plain
neighbour, "Ah, but when awake do we ever believe ourselves asleep?"
Things identical must be convertible. The preceding passage seems to
rest on a similar sophism. For the question is not, whether there may
not occur in prose an order of words, which would be equally proper in
a poem; nor whether there are not beautiful lines and sentences of
frequent occurrence in good poems, which would be equally becoming as
well as beautiful in good prose; for neither the one nor the other has
ever been either denied or doubted by any one. The true question must
be, whether there are not modes of expression, a construction, and an
order of sentences, which are in their fit and natural place in a
serious prose composition, but would be disproportionate and
heterogeneous in metrical poetry; and, vice versa, whether in the
language of a serious poem there may not be an arrangement both of
words and sentences, and a use and selection of (what are called)
figures of speech, both as to their kind, their frequency, and their
occasions, which on a subject of equal weight would be vicious and
alien in correct and manly prose. I contend, that in both cases this
unfitness of each for the place of the other frequently will and ought
to exist.

And first from the origin of metre. This I would trace to the balance
in the mind effected by that spontaneous effort which strives to hold
in check the workings of passion. It might be easily explained
likewise in what manner this salutary antagonism is assisted by the
very state, which it counteracts; and how this balance of antagonists
became organized into metre (in the usual acceptation of that term),
by a supervening act of the will and judgment, consciously and for the
foreseen purpose of pleasure. Assuming these principles, as the data
of our argument, we deduce from them two legitimate conditions, which
the critic is entitled to expect in every metrical work. First, that,
as the elements of metre owe their existence to a state of increased
excitement, so the metre itself should be accompanied by the natural
language of excitement. Secondly, that as these elements are formed
into metre artificially, by a voluntary act, with the design and for
the purpose of blending delight with emotion, so the traces of present
volition should throughout the metrical language be proportionately
discernible. Now these two conditions must be reconciled and co-
present. There must be not only a partnership, but a union; an
interpenetration of passion and of will, of spontaneous impulse and of
voluntary purpose. Again, this union can be manifested only in a
frequency of forms and figures of speech, (originally the offspring of
passion, but now the adopted children of power), greater than would be
desired or endured, where the emotion is not voluntarily encouraged
and kept up for the sake of that pleasure, which such emotion, so
tempered and mastered by the will, is found capable of communicating.
It not only dictates, but of itself tends to produce a more frequent
employment of picturesque and vivifying language, than would be
natural in any other case, in which there did not exist, as there does
in the present, a previous and well understood, though tacit, compact
between the poet and his reader, that the latter is entitled to
expect, and the former bound to supply this species and degree of
pleasurable excitement. We may in some measure apply to this union the
answer of Polixenes, in the Winter's Tale, to Perdita's neglect of the
streaked gilliflowers, because she had heard it said,

"There is an art, which, in their piedness, shares
With great creating nature.
POL. Say there be;
Yet nature is made better by no mean,
But nature makes that mean; so, o'er that art,
Which, you say, adds to nature, is an art,
That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry
A gentler scion to the wildest stock;
And make conceive a bark of baser kind
By bud of nobler race. This is an art,
Which does mend nature,--change it rather; but
The art itself is nature."

Secondly, I argue from the effects of metre. As far as metre acts in
and for itself, it tends to increase the vivacity and susceptibility
both of the general feelings and of the attention. This effect it
produces by the continued excitement of surprise, and by the quick
reciprocations of curiosity still gratified and still re-excited,
which are too slight indeed to be at any one moment objects of
distinct consciousness, yet become considerable in their aggregate
influence. As a medicated atmosphere, or as wine during animated
conversation, they act powerfully, though themselves unnoticed. Where,
therefore, correspondent food and appropriate matter are not provided
for the attention and feelings thus roused there must needs be a
disappointment felt; like that of leaping in the dark from the last
step of a stair-case, when we had prepared our muscles for a leap of
three or four.

The discussion on the powers of metre in the preface is highly
ingenious and touches at all points on truth. But I cannot find any
statement of its powers considered abstractly and separately. On the
contrary Mr. Wordsworth seems always to estimate metre by the powers,
which it exerts during, (and, as I think, in consequence of), its
combination with other elements of poetry. Thus the previous
difficulty is left unanswered, what the elements are, with which it
must be combined, in order to produce its own effects to any
pleasurable purpose. Double and tri-syllable rhymes, indeed, form a
lower species of wit, and, attended to exclusively for their own sake,
may become a source of momentary amusement; as in poor Smart's distich
to the Welsh Squire who had promised him a hare :

"Tell me, thou son of great Cadwallader!
Hast sent the hare? or hast thou swallow'd her?"

But for any poetic purposes, metre resembles, (if the aptness of the
simile may excuse its meanness), yeast, worthless or disagreeable by
itself, but giving vivacity and spirit to the liquor with which it is
proportionally combined.

The reference to THE CHILDREN IN THE WOOD by no means satisfies my
judgment. We all willingly throw ourselves back for awhile into the
feelings of our childhood. This ballad, therefore, we read under such
recollections of our own childish feelings, as would equally endear to
us poems, which Mr. Wordsworth himself would regard as faulty in the
opposite extreme of gaudy and technical ornament. Before the invention
of printing, and in a still greater degree, before the introduction of
writing, metre, especially alliterative metre, (whether alliterative
at the beginning of the words, as in PIERCE PLOUMAN, or at the end, as
in rhymes) possessed an independent value as assisting the
recollection, and consequently the preservation, of any series of
truths or incidents. But I am not convinced by the collation of facts,
that THE CHILDREN IN THE WOOD owes either its preservation, or its
popularity, to its metrical form. Mr. Marshal's repository affords a
number of tales in prose inferior in pathos and general merit, some of
as old a date, and many as widely popular. TOM HICKATHRIFT, JACK THE
GIANT-KILLER, GOODY TWO-SHOES, and LITTLE RED RIDING-HOOD are
formidable rivals. And that they have continued in prose, cannot be
fairly explained by the assumption, that the comparative meanness of
their thoughts and images precluded even the humblest forms of metre.
The scene of GOODY TWO-SHOES in the church is perfectly susceptible of
metrical narration; and, among the thaumata thaumastotata even of the
present age, I do not recollect a more astonishing image than that of
the "whole rookery, that flew out of the giant's beard," scared by the
tremendous voice, with which this monster answered the challenge of
the heroic TOM HICKATHRIFT!

If from these we turn to compositions universally, and independently
of all early associations, beloved and admired; would the MARIA, THE
MONK, or THE POOR MAN'S ASS of Sterne, be read with more delight, or
have a better chance of immortality, had they without any change in
the diction been composed in rhyme, than in their present state? If I
am not grossly mistaken, the general reply would be in the negative.
Nay, I will confess, that, in Mr. Wordsworth's own volumes, the
ANECDOTE FOR FATHERS, SIMON LEE, ALICE FELL, BEGGARS, and THE SAILOR'S
MOTHER, notwithstanding the beauties which are to be found in each of
them where the poet interposes the music of his own thoughts, would
have been more delightful to me in prose, told and managed, as by Mr.
Wordsworth they would have been, in a moral essay or pedestrian tour.

Metre in itself is simply a stimulant of the attention, and therefore
excites the question: Why is the attention to be thus stimulated? Now
the question cannot be answered by the pleasure of the metre itself;
for this we have shown to be conditional, and dependent on the
appropriateness of the thoughts and expressions, to which the metrical
form is superadded. Neither can I conceive any other answer that can
be rationally given, short of this: I write in metre, because I am
about to use a language different from that of prose. Besides, where
the language is not such, how interesting soever the reflections are,
that are capable of being drawn by a philosophic mind from the
thoughts or incidents of the poem, the metre itself must often become
feeble. Take the last three stanzas of THE SAILOR'S MOTHER, for
instance. If I could for a moment abstract from the effect produced on
the author's feelings, as a man, by the incident at the time of its
real occurrence, I would dare appeal to his own judgment, whether in
the metre itself he found a sufficient reason for their being written
metrically?

And, thus continuing, she said,
"I had a Son, who many a day
Sailed on the seas; but he is dead;
In Denmark he was cast away;
And I have travelled far as Hull to see
What clothes he might have left, or other property.

The Bird and Cage they both were his
'Twas my Son's Bird; and neat and trim
He kept it: many voyages
This Singing-bird hath gone with him;
When last he sailed he left the Bird behind;
As it might be, perhaps, from bodings of his mind.

He to a Fellow-lodger's care
Had left it, to be watched and fed,
Till he came back again; and there
I found it when my Son was dead;
And now, God help me for my little wit!
I trail it with me, Sir! he took so much delight in it."

If disproportioning the emphasis we read these stanzas so as to make
the rhymes perceptible, even tri-syllable rhymes could scarcely
produce an equal sense of oddity and strangeness, as we feel here in
finding rhymes at all in sentences so exclusively colloquial. I would
further ask whether, but for that visionary state, into which the
figure of the woman and the susceptibility of his own genius had
placed the poet's imagination,--(a state, which spreads its influence
and colouring over all, that co-exists with the exciting cause, and in
which

"The simplest, and the most familiar things
Gain a strange power of spreading awe around them,") [67]

I would ask the poet whether he would not have felt an abrupt downfall
in these verses from the preceding stanza?

"The ancient spirit is not dead;
Old times, thought I, are breathing there;
Proud was I that my country bred
Such strength, a dignity so fair:
She begged an alms, like one in poor estate;
I looked at her again, nor did my pride abate."

It must not be omitted, and is besides worthy of notice, that those
stanzas furnish the only fair instance that I have been able to
discover in all Mr. Wordsworth's writings, of an actual adoption, or
true imitation, of the real and very language of low and rustic life,
freed from provincialisms.

Thirdly, I deduce the position from all the causes elsewhere assigned,
which render metre the proper form of poetry, and poetry imperfect and
defective without metre. Metre, therefore, having been connected with
poetry most often and by a peculiar fitness, whatever else is combined
with metre must, though it be not itself essentially poetic, have
nevertheless some property in common with poetry, as an intermedium of
affinity, a sort, (if I may dare borrow a well-known phrase from
technical chemistry), of mordaunt between it and the super-added
metre. Now poetry, Mr. Wordsworth truly affirms, does always imply
passion: which word must be here understood in its most general sense,
as an excited state of the feelings and faculties. And as every
passion has its proper pulse, so will it likewise have its
characteristic modes of expression. But where there exists that degree
of genius and talent which entitles a writer to aim at the honours of
a poet, the very act of poetic composition itself is, and is allowed
to imply and to produce, an unusual state of excitement, which of
course justifies and demands a correspondent difference of language,
as truly, though not perhaps in as marked a degree, as the excitement
of love, fear, rage, or jealousy. The vividness of the descriptions or
declamations in Donne or Dryden, is as much and as often derived from
the force and fervour of the describer, as from the reflections, forms
or incidents, which constitute their subject and materials. The wheels
take fire from the mere rapidity of their motion. To what extent, and
under what modifications, this may be admitted to act, I shall attempt
to define in an after remark on Mr. Wordsworth's reply to this
objection, or rather on his objection to this reply, as already
anticipated in his preface.

Fourthly, and as intimately connected with this, if not the same
argument in a more general form, I adduce the high spiritual instinct
of the human being impelling us to seek unity by harmonious
adjustment, and thus establishing the principle that all the parts of
an organized whole must be assimilated to the more important and
essential parts. This and the preceding arguments may be strengthened
by the reflection, that the composition of a poem is among the
imitative arts; and that imitation, as opposed to copying, consists
either in the interfusion of the same throughout the radically
different, or of the different throughout a base radically the same.

Lastly, I appeal to the practice of the best poets, of all countries
and in all ages, as authorizing the opinion, (deduced from all the
foregoing,) that in every import of the word essential, which would
not here involve a mere truism, there may be, is, and ought to be an
essential difference between the language of prose and of metrical
composition.

In Mr. Wordsworth's criticism of Gray's Sonnet, the reader's sympathy
with his praise or blame of the different parts is taken for granted
rather perhaps too easily. He has not, at least, attempted to win or
compel it by argumentative analysis. In my conception at least, the
lines rejected as of no value do, with the exception of the two first,
differ as much and as little from the language of common life, as
those which he has printed in italics as possessing genuine
excellence. Of the five lines thus honourably distinguished, two of
them differ from prose even more widely, than the lines which either
precede or follow, in the position of the words.

"A different object do these eyes require;
My lonely anguish melts no heart but mine;
And in my breast the imperfect joys expire."

But were it otherwise, what would this prove, but a truth, of which no
man ever doubted?--videlicet, that there are sentences, which would be
equally in their place both in verse and prose. Assuredly it does not
prove the point, which alone requires proof; namely, that there are
not passages, which would suit the one and not suit the other. The
first line of this sonnet is distinguished from the ordinary language
of men by the epithet to morning. For we will set aside, at present,
the consideration, that the particular word "smiling" is hackneyed,
and, as it involves a sort of personification, not quite congruous
with the common and material attribute of "shining." And, doubtless,
this adjunction of epithets for the purpose of additional description,
where no particular attention is demanded for the quality of the
thing, would be noticed as giving a poetic cast to a man's
conversation. Should the sportsman exclaim, "Come boys! the rosy
morning calls you up:" he will be supposed to have some song in his
head. But no one suspects this, when he says, "A wet morning shall not
confine us to our beds." This then is either a defect in poetry, or it
is not. Whoever should decide in the affirmative, I would request him
to re-peruse any one poem, of any confessedly great poet from Homer to
Milton, or from Aeschylus to Shakespeare; and to strike out, (in
thought I mean), every instance of this kind. If the number of these
fancied erasures did not startle him; or if he continued to deem the
work improved by their total omission; he must advance reasons of no
ordinary strength and evidence, reasons grounded in the essence of
human nature. Otherwise, I should not hesitate to consider him as a
man not so much proof against all authority, as dead to it.

The second line,

"And reddening Phoebus lifts his golden fire;--"

has indeed almost as many faults as words. But then it is a bad line,
not because the language is distinct from that of prose; but because
it conveys incongruous images; because it confounds the cause and the
effect; the real thing with the personified representative of the
thing; in short, because it differs from the language of good sense!
That the "Phoebus "is hackneyed, and a school-boy image, is an
accidental fault, dependent on the age in which the author wrote, and
not deduced from the nature of the thing. That it is part of an
exploded mythology, is an objection more deeply grounded. Yet when the
torch of ancient learning was re-kindled, so cheering were its beams,
that our eldest poets, cut off by Christianity from all accredited
machinery, and deprived of all acknowledged guardians and symbols of
the great objects of nature, were naturally induced to adopt, as a
poetic language, those fabulous personages, those forms of the
[68]supernatural in nature, which had given them such dear delight in
the poems of their great masters. Nay, even at this day what scholar
of genial taste will not so far sympathize with them, as to read with
pleasure in Petrarch, Chaucer, or Spenser, what he would perhaps
condemn as puerile in a modern poet?

I remember no poet, whose writings would safelier stand the test of
Mr. Wordsworth's theory, than Spenser. Yet will Mr. Wordsworth say,
that the style of the following stanza is either undistinguished from
prose, and the language of ordinary life? Or that it is vicious, and
that the stanzas are blots in THE FAERY QUEEN?

"By this the northern wagoner had set
His sevenfold teme behind the stedfast starre,
That was in ocean waves yet never wet,
But firme is fixt and sendeth light from farre
To all that in the wild deep wandering arre
And chearfull chaunticlere with his note shrill
Had warned once that Phoebus' fiery carre
In hast was climbing up the easterne hill,
Full envious that night so long his roome did fill."

"At last the golden orientall gate
Of greatest heaven gan to open fayre,
And Phoebus fresh, as brydegrome to his mate,
Came dauncing forth, shaking his deawie hayre,
And hurl'd his glist'ring beams through gloomy ayre:
Which when the wakeful elfe perceived, streightway
He started up, and did him selfe prepayre
In sun-bright armes and battailous array;
For with that pagan proud he combat will that day."

On the contrary to how many passages, both in hymn books and in blank
verse poems, could I, (were it not invidious), direct the reader's
attention, the style of which is most unpoetic, because, and only
because, it is the style of prose? He will not suppose me capable of
having in my mind such verses, as

"I put my hat upon my head
And walk'd into the Strand;
And there I met another man,
Whose hat was in his hand."

To such specimens it would indeed be a fair and full reply, that these
lines are not bad, because they are unpoetic; but because they are
empty of all sense and feeling; and that it were an idle attempt to
prove that "an ape is not a Newton, when it is self-evident that he is
not a man." But the sense shall be good and weighty, the language
correct and dignified, the subject interesting and treated with
feeling; and yet the style shall, notwithstanding all these merits, be
justly b lamable as prosaic, and solely because the words and the order
of the words would find their appropriate place in prose, but are not
suitable to metrical composition. The CIVIL WARS of Daniel is an
instructive, and even interesting work; but take the following
stanzas, (and from the hundred instances which abound I might probably
have selected others far more striking):

"And to the end we may with better ease
Discern the true discourse, vouchsafe to shew
What were the times foregoing near to these,
That these we may with better profit know.
Tell how the world fell into this disease;
And how so great distemperature did grow;
So shall we see with what degrees it came;
How things at full do soon wax out of frame."

"Ten kings had from the Norman Conqu'ror reign'd
With intermix'd and variable fate,
When England to her greatest height attain'd
Of power, dominion, glory, wealth, and state;
After it had with much ado sustain'd
The violence of princes, with debate
For titles and the often mutinies
Of nobles for their ancient liberties."

"For first, the Norman, conqu'ring all by might,
By might was forc'd to keep what he had got;
Mixing our customs and the form of right
With foreign constitutions, he had brought;
Mast'ring the mighty, humbling the poorer wight,
By all severest means that could be wrought;
And, making the succession doubtful, rent
His new-got state, and left it turbulent."

Will it be contended on the one side, that these lines are mean and
senseless? Or on the other, that they are not prosaic, and for that
reason unpoetic? This poet's well-merited epithet is that of the
"well-languaged Daniel;" but likewise, and by the consent of his
contemporaries no less than of all succeeding critics, "the prosaic
Daniel." Yet those, who thus designate this wise and amiable writer
from the frequent incorrespondency of his diction to his metre in the
majority of his compositions, not only deem them valuable and
interesting on other accounts; but willingly admit, that there are to
be found throughout his poems, and especially in his EPISTLES and in
his HYMEN'S TRIUMPH, many and exquisite specimens of that style which,
as the neutral ground of prose and verse, is common to both. A fine
and almost faultless extract, eminent as for other beauties, so for
its perfection in this species of diction, may be seen in Lamb's
DRAMATIC SPECIMENS, a work of various interest from the nature of the
selections themselves, (all from the plays of Shakespeare's
contemporaries),--and deriving a high additional value from the notes,
which are full of just and original criticism, expressed with all the
freshness of originality.

Among the possible effects of practical adherence to a theory, that
aims to identify the style of prose and verse,--(if it does not indeed
claim for the latter a yet nearer resemblance to the average style of
men in the viva voce intercourse of real life)--we might anticipate
the following as not the least likely to occur. It will happen, as I
have indeed before observed, that the metre itself, the sole
acknowledged difference, will occasionally become metre to the eye
only. The existence of prosaisms, and that they detract from the merit
of a poem, must at length be conceded, when a number of successive
lines can be rendered, even to the most delicate ear, unrecognizable
as verse, or as having even been intended for verse, by simply
transcribing them as prose; when if the poem be in blank verse, this
can be effected without any alteration, or at most by merely restoring
one or two words to their proper places, from which they have been
transplanted [69] for no assignable cause or reason but that of the
author's convenience; but if it be in rhyme, by the mere exchange of
the final word of each line for some other of the same meaning,
equally appropriate, dignified and euphonic.

The answer or objection in the preface to the anticipated remark "that
metre paves the way to other distinctions," is contained in the
following words. "The distinction of rhyme and metre is regular and
uniform, and not, like that produced by (what is usually called)
poetic diction, arbitrary, and subject to infinite caprices, upon
which no calculation whatever can be made. In the one case the reader
is utterly at the mercy of the poet respecting what imagery or diction
he may choose to connect with the passion." But is this a poet, of
whom a poet is speaking? No surely! rather of a fool or madman: or at
best of a vain or ignorant phantast! And might not brains so wild and
so deficient make just the same havoc with rhymes and metres, as they
are supposed to effect with modes and figures of speech? How is the
reader at the mercy of such men? If he continue to read their
nonsense, is it not his own fault? The ultimate end of criticism is
much more to establish the principles of writing, than to furnish
rules how to pass judgment on what has been written by others; if
indeed it were possible that the two could be separated. But if it be
asked, by what principles the poet is to regulate his own style, if he
do not adhere closely to the sort and order of words which he hears in
the market, wake, high-road, or plough-field? I reply; by principles,
the ignorance or neglect of which would convict him of being no poet,
but a silly or presumptuous usurper of the name. By the principles of
grammar, logic, psychology. In one word by such a knowledge of the
facts, material and spiritual, that most appertain to his art, as, if
it have been governed and applied by good sense, and rendered
instinctive by habit, becomes the representative and reward of our
past conscious reasonings, insights, and conclusions, and acquires the
name of Taste. By what rule that does not leave the reader at the
poet's mercy, and the poet at his own, is the latter to distinguish
between the language suitable to suppressed, and the language, which
is characteristic of indulged, anger? Or between that of rage and that
of jealousy? Is it obtained by wandering about in search of angry or
jealous people in uncultivated society, in order to copy their words?
Or not far rather by the power of imagination proceeding upon the all
in each of human nature? By meditation, rather than by observation?
And by the latter in consequence only of the former? As eyes, for
which the former has pre-determined their field of vision, and to
which, as to its organ, it communicates a microscopic power? There is
not, I firmly believe, a man now living, who has, from his own inward
experience, a clearer intuition, than Mr. Wordsworth himself, that the
last mentioned are the true sources of genial discrimination. Through
the same process and by the same creative agency will the poet
distinguish the degree and kind of the excitement produced by the very
act of poetic composition. As intuitively will he know, what
differences of style it at once inspires and justifies; what
intermixture of conscious volition is natural to that state; and in
what instances such figures and colours of speech degenerate into mere
creatures of an arbitrary purpose, cold technical artifices of
ornament or connection. For, even as truth is its own light and
evidence, discovering at once itself and falsehood, so is it the
prerogative of poetic genius to distinguish by parental instinct its
proper offspring from the changelings, which the gnomes of vanity or
the fairies of fashion may have laid in its cradle or c alled by its
names. Could a rule be given from without, poetry would cease to be
poetry, and sink into a mechanical art. It would be morphosis, not
poiaesis. The rules of the Imagination are themselves the very powers
of growth and production. The words to which they are reducible,
present only the outlines and external appearance of the fruit. A
deceptive counterfeit of the superficial form and colours may be
elaborated; but the marble peach feels cold and heavy, and children
only put it to their mouths. We find no difficulty in admitting as
excellent, and the legitimate language of poetic fervour self-
impassioned, Donne's apostrophe to the Sun in the second stanza of his
PROGRESS OF THE SOUL.

"Thee, eye of heaven! this great Soul envies not;
By thy male force is all, we have, begot.
In the first East thou now beginn'st to shine,
Suck'st early balm and island spices there,
And wilt anon in thy loose-rein'd career
At Tagus, Po, Seine, Thames, and Danow dine,
And see at night this western world of mine:
Yet hast thou not more nations seen than she,
Who before thee one day began to be,
And, thy frail light being quench'd, shall long, long outlive
thee."

Or the next stanza but one:

"Great Destiny, the commissary of God,
That hast mark'd out a path and period
For every thing! Who, where we offspring took,
Our ways and ends see'st at one instant: thou
Knot of all causes! Thou, whose changeless brow
Ne'er smiles nor frowns! O! vouchsafe thou to look,
And shew my story in thy eternal book," etc.

As little difficulty do we find in excluding from the honours of
unaffected warmth and elevation the madness prepense of pseudopoesy,
or the startling hysteric of weakness over-exerting itself, which
bursts on the unprepared reader in sundry odes and apostrophes to
abstract terms. Such are the Odes to jealousy, to Hope, to Oblivion,
and the like, in Dodsley's collection and the magazines of that day,
which seldom fail to remind me of an Oxford copy of verses on the two
SUTTONS, commencing with

"Inoculation, heavenly maid! descend!"

It is not to be denied that men of undoubted talents, and even poets
of true, though not of first-rate, genius, have from a mistaken theory
deluded both themselves and others in the opposite extreme. I once
read to a company of sensible and well-educated women the introductory
period of Cowley's preface to his "Pindaric Odes," written in
imitation of the style and manner of the odes of Pindar. "If," (says
Cowley), "a man should undertake to translate Pindar, word for word,
it would be thought that one madman had translated another as may
appear, when he, that understands not the original, reads the verbal
traduction of him into Latin prose, than which nothing seems more
raving." I then proceeded with his own free version of the second
Olympic, composed for the charitable purpose of rationalizing the
Theban Eagle.

"Queen of all harmonious things,
Dancing words and speaking strings,
What god, what hero, wilt thou sing?
What happy man to equal glories bring?
Begin, begin thy noble choice,
And let the hills around reflect the image of thy voice.
Pisa does to Jove belong,
Jove and Pisa claim thy song.
The fair first-fruits of war, th' Olympic games,
Alcides, offer'd up to Jove;
Alcides, too, thy strings may move,
But, oh! what man to join with these can worthy prove?
Join Theron boldly to their sacred names;
Theron the next honour claims;
Theron to no man gives place,
Is first in Pisa's and in Virtue's race;
Theron there, and he alone,
Ev'n his own swift forefathers has outgone."

One of the company exclaimed, with the full assent of the rest, that
if the original were madder than this, it must be incurably mad. I
then translated the ode from the Greek, and as nearly as possible,
word for word; and the impression was, that in the general movement of
the periods, in the form of the connections and transitions, and in
the sober majesty of lofty sense, it appeared to them to approach more
nearly, than any other poetry they had heard, to the style of our
Bible, in the prophetic books. The first strophe will suffice as a
specimen:

"Ye harp-controlling hymns! (or) ye hymns the sovereigns of harps!
What God? what Hero?
What Man shall we celebrate?
Truly Pisa indeed is of Jove,
But the Olympiad (or the Olympic games) did Hercules establish,
The first-fruits of the spoils of war.
But Theron for the four-horsed car,
That bore victory to him,
It behoves us now to voice aloud:
The Just, the Hospitable,
The Bulwark of Agrigentum,
Of renowned fathers
The Flower, even him
Who preserves his native city erect and safe."

But are such rhetorical caprices condemnable only for their deviation
from the language of real life? and are they by no other means to be
precluded, but by the rejection of all distinctions between prose and
verse, save that of metre? Surely good sense, and a moderate insight
into the constitution of the human mind, would be amply sufficient to
prove, that such language and such combinations are the native product
neither of the fancy nor of the imagination; that their operation
consists in the excitement of surprise by the juxta-position and
apparent reconciliation of widely different or incompatible things. As
when, for instance, the hills are made to reflect the image of a
voice. Surely, no unusual taste is requisite to see clearly, that this
compulsory juxtaposition is not produced by the presentation of
impressive or delightful forms to the inward vision, nor by any
sympathy with the modifying powers with which the genius of the poet
had united and inspirited all the objects of his thought; that it is
therefore a species of wit, a pure work of the will, and implies a
leisure and self-possession both of thought and of feeling,
incompatible with the steady fervour of a mind possessed and filled
with the grandeur of its subject. To sum up the whole in one sentence.
When a poem, or a part of a poem, shall be adduced, which is evidently
vicious in the figures and centexture of its style, yet for the
condemnation of which no reason can be assigned, except that it
differs from the style in which men actually converse, then, and not
till then, can I hold this theory to be either plausible, or
practicable, or capable of furnishing either rule, guidance, or
precaution, that might not, more easily and more safely, as well as
more naturally, have been deduced in the author's own mind from
considerations of grammar, logic, and the truth and nature of things,
confirmed by the authority of works, whose fame is not of one country
nor of one age.

[Here ends chapter 18.  To read other chapters of
Biographia Literaria, click here.]

* * *


FOOTNOTES 
[by Samuel Taylor Coleridge]

[66]  It is no less an error in teachers, than a torment to the poor
children, to enforce the necessity of reading as they would talk. In
order to cure them of singing as it is called, that is, of too great a
difference, the child is made to repeat the words with his eyes from
off the book; and then, indeed, his tones resemble talking, as far as
his fears, tears and trembling will permit. But as soon as the eye is
again directed to the printed page, the spell begins anew; for an
instinctive sense tells the child’s feelings, that to utter its own
momentary thoughts, and to recite the written thoughts of another, as
of another, and a far wiser than himself, are two widely different
things; and as the two acts are accompanied with widely different
feelings, so must they justify different modes of enunciation. Joseph
Lancaster, among his other sophistications of the excellent Dr. Bell’s
invaluable system, cures this fault of singing, by hanging fetters and
chains on the child, to the music of which one of his school-fellows,
who walks before, dolefully chants out the child’s last speech and
confession, birth, parentage, and education. And this soul-benumbing
ignominy, this unholy and heart-hardening burlesque on the last
fearful infliction of outraged law, in pronouncing the sentence to
which the stern and familiarized judge not seldom bursts into tears,
has been extolled as a happy and ingenious method of remedying–what?
and how?–why, one extreme in order to introduce another, scarce less
distant from good sense, and certainly likely to have worse moral
effects, by enforcing a semblance of petulant ease and self-
sufficiency, in repression and possible after-perversion of the
natural feelings. I have to beg Dr. Bell’s pardon for this connection
of the two names, but he knows that contrast is no less powerful a
cause of association than likeness.

[67] Altered from the description of Night-Mair in the REMORSE.
“Oh Heaven! ’twas frightful! Now ran down and stared at
By hideous shapes that cannot be remembered;
Now seeing nothing and imagining nothing;
But only being afraid–stifled with fear!
While every goodly or familiar form
Had a strange power of spreading terror round me!”
N.B.–Though Shakespeare has, for his own all justifying purposes,
introduced the Night-Mare with her own foals, yet Mair means a Sister,
or perhaps a Hag.

[68] But still more by the mechanical system of philosophy which has
needlessly infected our theological opinions, and teaching us to
consider the world in its relation to god, as of a building to its
mason, leaves the idea of omnipresence a mere abstract notion in the
stateroom of our reason.

[69] As the ingenious gentleman under the influence of the Tragic Muse
contrived to dislocate, “I wish you a good morning, Sir! Thank you,
Sir, and I wish you the same,” into two blank-verse heroics:–
To you a morning good, good Sir! I wish.
You, Sir! I thank: to you the same wish I.
In those parts of Mr. Wordsworth’s works which I have thoroughly
studied, I find fewer instances in which this would be practicable
than I have met to many poems, where an approximation of prose has
been sedulously and on system guarded against. Indeed excepting the
stanzas already quoted from THE SAILOR’S MOTHER, I can recollect but
one instance: that is to say, a short passage of four or five lines in
THE BROTHERS, that model of English pastoral, which I never yet read
with unclouded eye.–“James, pointing to its summit, over which they
had all purposed to return together, informed them that he would wait
for them there. They parted, and his comrades passed that way some two
hours after, but they did not find him at the appointed place, _a
circumstance of which they took no heed:_ but one of them, going by
chance into the house, which at this time was James’s house, learnt
_there,_ that nobody had seen him all that day.” The only change which
has been made is in the position of the little word there in two
instances, the position in the original being clearly such as is not
adopted in ordinary conversation. The other words printed in italics
were so marked because, though good and genuine English, they are not
the phraseology of common conversation either in the word put in
apposition, or in the connection by the genitive pronoun. Men in
general would have said, “but that was a circumstance they paid no
attention to, or took no notice of;” and the language is, on the
theory of the preface, justified only by the narrator’s being the
Vicar. Yet if any ear could suspect, that these sentences were ever
printed as metre, on those very words alone could the suspicion have
been grounded.

  

Biographia Literaria – Chapter XVII (by Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

09 Wednesday Jun 2010

Posted by Crisis Chronicles Press in 1800s, Autobiography, British, Coleridge (Samuel T), Philosophy, Writing

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Biographia
Literaria
by
Samuel
Taylor
Coleridge

Chapter XVII [of
XXII]                                                     [To
read other chapters,
click here.]



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 formidabl e 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." But in a poem, still more in a lyric poem--and the Nurse
in ROMEO AND JULIET alone prevents me from extending the remark even
to dramatic poetry, if indeed even the Nurse can be deemed altogether
a case in point--it is not possible to imitate truly a dull and
garrulous discourser, without repeating the effects of dullness and
garrulity. However this may be, I dare assert, that the parts--(and
these form the far larger portion of the whole)--which might as well
or still better have proceeded from the poet's own imagination, and
have been spoken in his own character, are those which have given, and
which will continue to give, universal delight; and that the passages
exclusively appropriate to the supposed narrator, such as the last
couplet of the third stanza [64]; the seven last lines of the tenth
[65]; and the five following stanzas, with the exception of the four
admirable lines at the commencement of the fourteenth, are felt by
many unprejudiced and unsophisticated hearts, as sudden and unpleasant
sinkings from the height to which the poet had previously lifted them,
and to which he again re-elevates both himself and his reader.

If then I am compelled to doubt the theory, by which the choice of
characters was to be directed, not only a priori, from grounds of
reason, but both from the few instances in which the poet himself need
be supposed to have been governed by it, and from the comparative
inferiority of those instances; still more must I hesitate in my
assent to the sentence which immediately follows the former citation;
and which I can neither admit as particular fact, nor as general rule.
"The language, too, of these men has been adopted (purified indeed
from what appear to be its real defects, from all lasting and rational
causes of dislike or disgust) because such men hourly communicate with
the best objects from which the best part of language is originally
derived; and because, from their rank in society and the sameness and
narrow circle of their intercourse, being less under the action of
social vanity, they convey their feelings and notions in simple and
unelaborated expressions." To this I reply; that a rustic's language,
purified from all provincialism and grossness, and so far
reconstructed as to be made consistent with the rules of grammar--
(which are in essence no other than the laws of universal logic,
applied to psychological materials)--will not differ from the language
of any other man of common sense, however learned or refined he may
be, except as far as the notions, which the rustic has to convey, are
fewer and more indiscriminate. This will become still clearer, if we
add the consideration--(equally important though less obvious)--that
the rustic, from the more imperfect development of his faculties, and
from the lower state of their cultivation, aims almost solely to
convey insulated facts, either those of his scanty experience or his
traditional belief; while the educated man chiefly seeks to discover
and express those connections of things, or those relative bearings of
fact to fact, from which some more or less general law is deducible.
For facts are valuable to a wise man, chiefly as they lead to the
discovery of the indwelling law, which is the true being of things,
the sole solution of their modes of existence, and in the knowledge of
which consists our dignity and our power.

As little can I agree with the assertion, that from the objects with
which the rustic hourly communicates the best part of language is
formed. For first, if to communicate with an object implies such an
acquaintance with it, as renders it capable of being discriminately
reflected on, the distinct knowledge of an uneducated rustic would
furnish a very scanty vocabulary. The few things and modes of action
requisite for his bodily conveniences would alone be individualized;
while all the rest of nature would be expressed by a small number of
confused general terms. Secondly, I deny that the words and
combinations of words derived from the objects, with which the rustic
is familiar, whether with distinct or confused knowledge, can be
justly said to form the best part of language. It is more than
probable, that many classes of the brute creation possess
discriminating sounds, by which they can convey to each other notices
of such objects as concern their food, shelter, or safety. Yet we
hesitate to call the aggregate of such sounds a language, otherwise
than metaphorically. The best part of human language, properly so
called, is derived from reflection on the acts of the mind itself. It
is formed by a voluntary appropriation of fixed symbols to internal
acts, to processes and results of imagination, the greater part of
which have no place in the consciousness of uneducated man; though in
civilized society, by imitation and passive remembrance of what they
hear from their religious instructors and other superiors, the most
uneducated share in the harvest which they neither sowed, nor reaped.
If the history of the phrases in hourly currency among our peasants
were traced, a person not previously aware of the fact would be
surprised at finding so large a number, which three or four centuries
ago were the exclusive property of the universities and the schools;
and, at the commencement of the Reformation, had been transferred from
the school to the pulpit, and thus gradually passed into common life.
The extreme difficulty, and often the impossibility, of finding words
for the simplest moral and intellectual processes of the languages of
uncivilized tribes has proved perhaps the weightiest obstacle to the
progress of our most zealous and adroit missionaries. Yet these tribes
are surrounded by the same nature as our peasants are; but in still
more impressive forms; and they are, moreover, obliged to
particularize many more of them. When, therefore, Mr. Wordsworth adds,
"accordingly, such a language"--(meaning, as before, the language of
rustic life purified from provincialism)--"arising out of repeated
experience and regular feelings, is a more permanent, and a far more
philosophical language, than that which is frequently substituted for
it by Poets, who think that they are conferring honour upon themselves
and their art in proportion as they indulge in arbitrary and
capricious habits of expression;" it may be answered, that the
language, which he has in view, can be attributed to rustics with no
greater right, than the style of Hooker or Bacon to Tom Brown or Sir
Roger L'Estrange. Doubtless, if what is peculiar to each were omitted
in each, the result must needs be the same. Further, that the poet,
who uses an illogical diction, or a style fitted to excite only the
low and changeable pleasure of wonder by means of groundless novelty,
substitutes a language of folly and vanity, not for that of the
rustic, but for that of good sense and natural feeling.

Here let me be permitted to remind the reader, that the positions,
which I controvert, are contained in the sentences--"a selection of
the real language of men;"--"the language of these men" (that is, men
in low and rustic life) "has been adopted; I have proposed to myself
to imitate, and, as far as is possible, to adopt the very language of
men."

"Between the language of prose and that of metrical composition, there
neither is, nor can be, any essential difference:" it is against these
exclusively that my opposition is directed.

I object, in the very first instance, to an equivocation in the use of
the word "real." Every man's language varies, according to the extent
of his knowledge, the activity of his faculties, and the depth or
quickness of his feelings. Every man's language has, first, its
individualities; secondly, the common properties of the class to which
he belongs; and thirdly, words and phrases of universal use. The
language of Hooker, Bacon, Bishop Taylor, and Burke differs from the
common language of the learned class only by the superior number and
novelty of the thoughts and relations which they had to convey. The
language of Algernon Sidney differs not at all fr om that, which every
well-educated gentleman would wish to write, and (with due allowances
for the undeliberateness, and less connected train, of thinking
natural and proper to conversation) such as he would wish to talk.
Neither one nor the other differ half as much from the general
language of cultivated society, as the language of Mr. Wordsworth's
homeliest composition differs from that of a common peasant. For
"real" therefore, we must substitute ordinary, or lingua communis. And
this, we have proved, is no more to be found in the phraseology of low
and rustic life than in that of any other class. Omit the
peculiarities of each and the result of course must be common to all.
And assuredly the omissions and changes to be made in the language of
rustics, before it could be transferred to any species of poem, except
the drama or other professed imitation, are at least as numerous and
weighty, as would be required in adapting to the same purpose the
ordinary language of tradesmen and manufacturers. Not to mention, that
the language so highly extolled by Mr. Wordsworth varies in every
county, nay in every village, according to the accidental character of
the clergyman, the existence or non-existence of schools; or even,
perhaps, as the exciteman, publican, and barber happen to be, or not
to be, zealous politicians, and readers of the weekly newspaper pro
bono publico. Anterior to cultivation the lingua communis of every
country, as Dante has well observed, exists every where in parts, and
no where as a whole.

Neither is the case rendered at all more tenable by the addition of
the words, "in a state of excitement." For the nature of a man's
words, where he is strongly affected by joy, grief, or anger, must
necessarily depend on the number and quality of the general truths,
conceptions and images, and of the words expressing them, with which
his mind had been previously stored. For the property of passion is
not to create; but to set in increased activity. At least, whatever
new connections of thoughts or images, or --(which is equally, if not
more than equally, the appropriate effect of strong excitement)--
whatever generalizations of truth or experience the heat of passion
may produce; yet the terms of their conveyance must have pre-existed
in his former conversations, and are only collected and crowded
together by the unusual stimulation. It is indeed very possible to
adopt in a poem the unmeaning repetitions, habitual phrases, and other
blank counters, which an unfurnished or confused understanding
interposes at short intervals, in order to keep hold of his subject,
which is still slipping from him, and to give him time for
recollection; or, in mere aid of vacancy, as in the scanty companies
of a country stage the same player pops backwards and forwards, in
order to prevent the appearance of empty spaces, in the procession of
Macbeth, or Henry VIII. But what assistance to the poet, or ornament
to the poem, these can supply, I am at a loss to conjecture. Nothing
assuredly can differ either in origin or in mode more widely from the
apparent tautologies of intense and turbulent feeling, in which the
passion is greater and of longer endurance than to be exhausted or
satisfied by a single representation of the image or incident exciting
it. Such repetitions I admit to be a beauty of the highest kind; as
illustrated by Mr. Wordsworth himself from the song of Deborah. At her
feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down: at her feet he bowed, he fell:
where he bowed, there he fell down dead. Judges v. 27.

[Here ends chapter 17.  To read other chapters of
Biographia Literaria, click here.]

* * *


FOOTNOTES 
[by Samuel Taylor Coleridge]

[64] 

      "I've measured it from side to side;
'Tis three feet long, and two feet wide."

  

Biographia Literaria – Chapter XVI (by Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

09 Wednesday Jun 2010

Posted by Crisis Chronicles Press in 1800s, Autobiography, British, Coleridge (Samuel T), Philosophy, Writing

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Biographia
Literaria
by
Samuel Taylor
Coleridge

Chapter XVI [of
XXII]                                                     [To
read other chapters,
click here.]



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
an d 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.

[Here ends chapter 16.  To read other chapters of
Biographia Literaria, click here.]

* * *


FOOTNOTES 
[by Samuel Taylor Coleridge]

[62]  First published in 1803.

[63] These thoughts were suggested to me during the perusal of the
Madrigals of Giovambatista Strozzi published in Florence in May, 1593,
by his sons Lorenzo and Filippo Strozzi, with a dedication to their
paternal uncle, Signor Leone Strozzi, Generale delle battaglie di
Santa Chiesa. As I do not remember to have seen either the poems or
their author mentioned in any English work, or to have found them in
any of the common collections of Italian poetry; and as the little
work is of rare occurrence; I will transcribe a few specimens. I have
seldom met with compositions that possessed, to my feelings, more of
that satisfying entireness, that complete adequateness of the manner
to the matter which so charms us in Anacreon, joined with the
tenderness, and more than the delicacy of Catullus. Trifles as they
are, they were probably elaborated with great care; yet to the perusal
we refer them to a spontaneous energy rather than to voluntary effort.
To a cultivated taste there is a delight in perfection for its own
sake, independently of the material in which it is manifested, that
none but a cultivated taste can understand or appreciate.
After what I have advanced, it would appear presumption to offer a
translation; even if the attempt were not discouraged by the different
genius of the English mind and language, which demands a denser body
of thought as the condition of a high polish, than the Italian. I
cannot but deem it likewise an advantage in the Italian tongue, in
many other respects inferior to our own, that the language of poetry
is more distinct from that of prose than with us. From the earlier
appearance and established primacy of the Tuscan. poets, concurring
with the number of independent states, and the diversity of written
dialects, the Italians have gained a poetic idiom, as the Greeks
before them had obtained from the same causes with greater and more
various discriminations, for example, the Ionic for their heroic
verses; the Attic for their iambic; and the two modes of the Doric for
the lyric or sacerdotal, and the pastoral, the distinctions of which
were doubtless more obvious to the Greeks themselves than they are to
us.
I will venture to add one other observation before I proceed to the
transcription. I am aware that the sentiments which I have avowed
concerning the points of difference between the poetry of the present
age, and that of the period between 1500 and 1650, are the reverse of
the opinion commonly entertained. I was conversing on this subject
with a friend, when the servant, a worthy and sensible woman, coming
in, I placed before her two engravings, the one a pinky-coloured plate
of the day, the other a masterly etching by Salvator Rosa from one of
his own pictures. On pressing her to tell us, which she preferred,
after a little blushing and flutter of feeling, she replied “Why,
that, Sir, to be sure! (pointing to the ware from the Fleet-street
print shops);–it’s so neat and elegant. T’other is such a scratchy
slovenly thing.” An artist, whose writings are scarcely less valuable
than his pictures, and to whose authority more deference will be
willingly paid, than I could even wish should be shown to mine, has
told us, and from his own experience too, that good taste must be
acquired, and like all other good things, is the result of thought and
the submissive study of the best models. If it be asked, “But what
shall I deem such?”–the answer is; presume those to be the best, the
reputation of which has been matured into fame by the consent of ages.
For wisdom always has a final majority, if not by conviction, yet by
acquiescence. In addition to Sir J. Reynolds I may mention Harris of
Salisbury; who in one of his philosophical disquisitions has written
on the means of acquiring a just taste with the precision of
Aristotle, and the elegance of Quinctilian.

    MADRIGALI.

Gelido suo ruscel chiaro, e tranquillo
M'insegno Amor di state a mezzo'l giorno;
Ardean le solve, ardean le piagge, e i colli.
Ond' io, ch' al piu gran gielo ardo e sfavillo,
Subito corsi; ma si puro adorno
Girsene il vidi, che turbar no'l volli:
Sol mi specchiava, e'n dolce ombrosa sponda
Mi stava intento al mormorar dell' onda.

Aure dell' angoscioso viver mio
Refrigerio soave,
E dolce si, che piu non mi par grave
Ne'l ardor, ne'l morir, anz' il desio;
Deh voil ghiaccio, e le nubi, e'l tempo rio
Discacciatene omai, che londa chiara,
E l'ombra non men cara
A scherzare, a cantar per suoi boschetti,
E prati festa et allegrezza alletti.

Pacifiche, ma spesso in amorosa
Guerra co'fiori, e l'erba
Alla stagione acerba
Verdi insegne del giglio e della rosa,
Movete, Aure, pian pian; che tregua o posa,
Se non pace, io ritrove;
E so ben dove:--Oh vago, a mansueto
Sguardo, oh labbra d'ambrosia, oh rider, lieto!

Hor come un scoglio stassi,
Hor come un rio se'n fugge,
Ed hor crud' orsa rugge,
Hor canta angelo pio: ma che non fassi!
E che non fammi, O sassi,
O rivi, o belue, o Dii, questa mia vaga
Non so, se ninfa, o magna,
Non so, se donna, o Dea,
Non so, se dolce o rea?

Piangendo mi baciaste,
E ridendo il negaste:
In doglia hebbivi pin,
In festa hebbivi ria:
Nacque gioia di pianti,
Dolor di riso: O amanti
Miseri, habbiate insieme
Ognor paura e speme.

Bel Fior, tu mi rimembri
La rugiadosa guancia del bet viso;
E si vera l'assembri,
Che'n te sovente, come in lei m'affiso:
Et hor del vago riso,
Hor del serene sguardo
Io pur cieco riguardo. Ma qual fugge,
O Rosa, il mattin lieve!
E chi te, come neve,
E'l mio cor teco, e la mia vita strugge!

Anna mia, Anna dolce, oh sempre nuovo
E piu chiaro concento,
Quanta dolcezza sento
In sol Anna dicendo? Io mi pur pruovo,
Ne qui tra noi ritruovo,
Ne tra cieli armonia,
Che del bel nome suo piu dolce sia:
Altro il Cielo, altro Amore,
Altro non suona l'Ecco del mio core.

Hor che'l prato, e la selva si scoiora,
Al tuo serena ombroso
Muovine, alto Riposo,
Deh ch'io riposi una sol notte, un hora:
Han le fere, e git augelli, ognun talora
Ha qualche pace; io quando,
Lasso! non vonne errando,
E non piango, e non grido? e qual pur forte?
Ma poiche, non sent' egli, odine, Morte.

Risi e piansi d'Amor; ne pero mai
Se non in fiamma, o'n onda, o'n vento scrissi
Spesso msrce trovai
Crudel; sempre in me morto, in altri vissi:
Hor da' piu scuri Abissi al ciel m'aizai,
Hor ne pur caddi giuso;
Stance al fin qui son chiuso.

  

Biographia Literaria – Chapter XV (by Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

09 Wednesday Jun 2010

Posted by Crisis Chronicles Press in 1800s, Autobiography, British, Coleridge (Samuel T), Philosophy, Writing

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Biographia
Literaria
by Samuel Taylor
Coleridge

Chapter XV [of
XXII]                                                     [To
read other chapters,
click here.]


The specific symptoms of poetic power elucidated in a critical
analysis of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis and 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." [Shakespeare's Sonnet 33rd]

"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." [Sonnet 107]

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. [Wordsworth]

[Here ends chapter 15.  To read other chapters of
Biographia Literaria, click here.]

* * *


FOOTNOTES 
[by Samuel Taylor Coleridge]

[61]  ‘Anaer morionous, a phrase which I have borrowed from a Greek
monk, who applies it to a Patriarch of Constantinople. I might have
said, that I have reclaimed, rather than borrowed, it: for it seems to
belong to Shakespeare, de jure singulari, et ex privilegio naturae.

  

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